Park N Pork fire recovery fund

Hi...I'm Jennifer Vieux, owner of the Park N Pork BBQ food truck in Wichita, Kansas. A couple of years ago, my husband and I started talking about the possibility of opening a food truck. We spent about a year doing lots of market research and developing a very detailed business plan that we could present to a bank for a loan. Our hard work paid off...we worked with our local Rose Hill Bank, and the SBA, and our dream became reality. We waited, for about 6 months as we had our truck custom built for us. After much anticipation, we finally rolled out for our grand opening in late April 2014. We spent the entire spring and summer at festivals, car shows, motocross races, charity events, food truck rally's, lunch spots and doing catering jobs. We absolutely LOVE serving up our food around town...and we gained a great group of followers too!

We did hit a few speed bumps along the way. When my husband and his friend first drove our truck home from Ohio, they had to stop in Kansas City because a horrible noise was coming from the engine. We ended up having to have our "brand new" (equipment was all new, truck was used) food truck towed to Wichita from KC. With the help of good friends, we were able to do some engine repairs that would allow us to keep our planned grand opening date. However, we knew we would have to replace our engine in the near future, something we certainly had not budgeted for. We managed to limp along for a couple of months until we finally had to take the big financial plunge and install a new engine. If it weren't for some very dear friends of ours who helped us out, we would not have been able to do it. Needless to say, we were very thankful that we would no longer have the worrries of our engine breaking down, and we figured we would be good to go for a very long time.

Well, on October 26th, as we were driving to the monthly Waterwalk Food truck rally, the unthinkable happened. A fire started in our engine and ended up burning our entire truck down. Although I am very lucky to be alive, we are absolutely devastated and heartbroken over the loss of our food truck. We do have insurance that will cover replacing our truck. Unfortunately, when we set up our original insurance policies, we were not informed that we would need additional insurance to cover our small wares and any belongings that we had on our truck. This would include food, supplies, cash register, iPad, square readers, pots, pans, utensils, coolers, etc. and lost wages as we rebuild. We also still have debt to our friends who so graciously helped us out. We are estimating that we need approximately $25000 to get us back up and running again...and we can't do it without your help. We don't have the resources to replace everything that we lost in the fire. We really, really want to get the Park N Pork back out on the road as soon as possible.  Any donation will help us reach our goal.  If you could share our campaign with your friends and colleagues we would really appreciate it too.  Thank you from the bottom of our hearts!!   We can't wait to serve you again!!