Roaming Hunger — Local services in Los Angeles

If you are considering using Roaming Hunger to coordinate with a food truck for your event, seriously consider working with a food truck directly. Based on my experience, it would have been easier to work with a food truck directly than go through Roaming Hunger.

My fiancée and I decided a food truck would be a good fit for our wedding, which we had scheduled in May 2020. We started working with Roaming Hunger in mid-2019.

Onboarding was easy. We filled out an online form and someone from Roaming Hunger promptly called us and discussed their services. Emphasis was placed on their services to coordinate tastings, handle any paperwork for permits, and their guarantee that they would make us whole if something happened on the day of the event. Paying the $250 non-refundable service fee was simple.

While onboarding was easy, the rest of our experience with Roaming Hunger had serious issues. We coordinated with our representative, Aramis, primarily over email. In general the questions we asked were answered slowly and incompletely. The tastings set up for us had multiple problems. After we picked which food trucks to try, it took longer than expected to get the appointments with them set. When the appointments were set, which were spread out over multiple weeks, there were basic scheduling issues that made the process painful.

A situation representative of our problems went as follows: A tasting with a food truck was set up at a commercial kitchen for a Saturday morning. When we arrived at the large facility, nobody was there and there was no indication of where to go. We had not been provided contact details for the food truck directly, so we had no way to contact the food truck. We found their number on our phones and tried to call them, with no success. We emailed Aramis multiple times after unsuccessfully looking around, with no response. We called Aramis multiple times, with no response. We left and later found out from Aramis that they had given us the time in a different timezone, so the truck had been there one hour before we were and we missed it. A different date was set for the same tasting and we were able to find the truck that day. We were impressed with the food and the person running the food truck and decided that that's who we wanted. When we discussed their price for different options, they told us significantly lower prices than Aramis had conveyed to us. They insisted that those were the numbers they had given to Roaming Hunger and we said we'd follow up. We brought up the price differences with Aramis who gave vague responses and wasn't able to give us information on different price options. Ultimately with the invoice was sent over it had the lower price that the vendor had told us, which we signed. We paid a refundable 50% of the total cost at this time (about $1000 for our event.)

Months after we decided on a truck, COVID-19 emerged and we decided to have a family-only celebration instead. First we postponed our event a year, which was handled by someone other than our representative in a simple email exchange. After that, we decided to cancel our event. We sent our first email in September 2020 and after repeated emails, calls, and ultimately posts on social media, heard no response until December. Finally we're in touch with a third person at Roaming Hunger who is processing our cancelation and refund and who replies to our emails. The refund has not been completed yet.

Update: Our refund was sent to us by check and processed successfully. The person who ultimately coordinated our refund, Taylor, was very responsive and courteous.

All of the problems we faced were avoidable. We thought working with this company would spare us confusion and uncertainty, but we were confused and uncertain the...

This review has been edited.

Apparently, some wires got crossed and the food truck was only paid for sides of corn and French fries. This truck was supposed to be the main food for the entire event, serving lunch to 100 people. Instead, we had to order pizza. The document the truck had showed they only got paid $900 but my receipt and confirmation said $1430. This was incredibly disappointing as they were unable to provide the meal specified in my proposal - 1 main, 1 side, 1 drink. It was an embarrassment for my organization and we ended up supplementing the food with pizza purchased locally.

At first, my contact at Roaming Hunger claimed that was all I had paid for (sides) but when I produced my paid for proposal, they backtracked and said that they food truck was not delivering their menu as promised. We chose this truck for their expansive menu, hoping to provide all of our employees choice. Instead we got very uncomfortable exchanges were our employees were being asked to pay for their meals.

The final email confirmation from Roaming Hunger did not have enough information to double check that what was ordered was actually what would be delivered and I had no way of knowing what the food truck had actually been told. It feels like someone wanted to make a bit of extra money by only paying the food truck $900 out of the $1430 I paid. I cannot fathom who would order just corn and fries for an event, especially for $900, and wish that I had been connected directly with the food truck earlier.

I was able to work with Roaming Hunger to receive a partial refund for the order, which did increase this review from 1 to 2 stars. Overall, I will not use this service again. The inconvenience of the order the food truck received not matching what I actually paid for drastically outweighs the convenience of getting quotes from...

If you use this service, be prepared to document every single thing. Any communication between them, you, and the truck you book must be explicit in writing or you will have a hell of a time getting any kind of resolution in the case that the truck and yourself have any kind of dispute. I would advise anyone considering using this service to just reach out and book food trucks directly. You'll probably pay less and have more of a hands on experience to ensure you get what you pay for. Honestly this service created more work for me than helping me. I used them to book 2 trucks for my wedding day and while one of the trucks was phenomenal, the other ruined part of day and Roaming Hunger wasn't very good at advocating on my behalf since they have an established relationship with the food truck in question. As a paying customer who had issues with their vendor, it's disappointing to know they really didn't do much for me when a problem came up. The vendor lied to both myself and RH during the dispute process and this put me in a losing spot. They did give me a 25% refund which is better than nothing, but had I booked with the food truck directly, I could have pushed for a full refund because the problems they caused me where beyond measure and the experience was nowhere close to what I was contracted to have. Stay away from the service unless you're prepared to fight for yourself if a problem arises & just know Roaming Hunger will side with their vendor over you; their...