Food trucks are not a new idea but the significant growth in the variety of foods served and the number of trucks operating means this retail option is becoming more important. The growth of this segment can be explained by McNair’s (1958) wheel of retailing theory which indicates that growth in retailing happens when new types of retailers with low startup costs, low capital and low prices enter the market – exactly what is occurring with food trucks entering the mature food retailing market. There has been limited academic research regarding the food truck industry. To better understand this retail segment and the factors influencing it, we conducted in-depth discussions with nine food truck owner/operators in the Midwest and Gulf Coast regions of the United States. The discussions with the food truck owner/operators indicated three critical areas: marketing, growth strategy, and legal issues. Technology was found to be vital to this retail segment with social media being used to promote the business and many vendors mentioned that apps like Square (which enables credit card payments) help them get additional sales when customers lack cash. These apps also helped the owner/operators manage some of the legal/regulatory issues associated with operating within different municipalities. Our in-depth discussions with the nine food truck vendors provided insight into the food truck business and helped refine our understanding of critical concerns of this growing industry.

The value created by supply chain management (SCM) practices means managers today are even more interested in these initiatives, this is especially true in emerging markets where they can have a profound impact. This research examines several critical SCM initiatives (strategic supplier partnerships, information quality, and proactive logistics practices), and their impact on supply chain flexibility, and ultimately organizational performance for small scale (fewer than 100 employees) manufacturing firms in India. These constructs are especially important for India because it has been suggested that they have high logistics costs as a result of insufficient infrastructure (e.g., power grid) and various labor-related issues. Under the Extended Resource Based View of the firm (Mathews, 2003) managers realize that capitalizing on supplier capabilities can improve the firm’s own responsiveness and overall performance. Therefore we examined strategic supplier partnerships (the long-term cooperative exchanges with critical suppliers) and proactive logistics practices (the interactions specifically with logistics providers regarding planning and joint problem solving), along with information quality (including accuracy, adequacy, timeliness, and credibility of information being exchanged) (Monczka et al., 1998). Other constructs include supply chain flexibility (the ability of the firm to respond to any change concerning its trading partners) and organizational performance (capturing productivity, efficiency, market share, and profit level) (Yamin et al., 1999; Tan et al., 1998). Validated scales developed by Li (2002) and Tan et al. (1998) were used and firm owners were targeted from a list of Coimbatore’s (a city in India) small scale manufacturers covering a wide-range of industries. The result was 75 completed surveys (a 94% response rate) which we evaluated using partial least squares (PLS) path modeling as appropriate for our sample size. The findings indicate that improving strategic supplier partnerships and information quality enables the firm to achieve a more flexible supply chain and ultimately better organizational performance. This research improves our understanding of critical considerations