Owners of popular Wichita food truck are retiring to Portugal, want to sell the business
Here’s a chance for an aspiring Wichita food trucker to slide right into the business.
Cynthia Wilson and Craig Bjork, who opened their LumpiaPalooza food truck in 2017, are retiring, and they want to sell the business — truck, recipes, equipment and all.
“Someone who wants a successful food truck can buy LumpiaPalooza for about the same price as a new truck and have a proven money maker,” Wilson said.
The couple was always planning to retire at the end of the 2021 food truck season, Wilson said. They were already slowing down, having closed their Parsnipity Cafe in September 2019 after three years operating on the ground floor of the Epic Center.
And they had already made plans to move to Portugal, where beaches are near and cost of living is low.
Then COVID-19 hit.
“We started this season with great vigor, ready to go, and then the COVID hit, and in March, all of our events were canceled,” said Wilson, whose truck was always a big attraction at nearby festivals and fairs.
Once the pandemic started, the couple would still do lunches here and there around town, but they didn’t feel safe. They were handling money and credit cards and were having trouble keeping people socially distanced.
And once life slowed down, Wilson said, they couldn’t really imagine ramping it back up again, even if conditions became safer.
“Every time we went out, I would say, ‘Should we be doing this?’” Wilson said. “Then one day I said to Craig, ‘Let’s just move our retirement up a year and not do this.’”
The couple let their food truck licenses expire on July 31.
Wilson said that she and Bjork enjoyed the whirlwind four-year cap to their work lives. Back in 2016, when she first opened Parsnipity Cafe, Wilson was a longtime home chef who loved making lumpia — fried Filipino egg rolls. Her husband had been a marine and worked as a geologist. The two collaborated on the food truck and came up with the idea to stuff lumpia wrappers with all kinds of offbeat fillings, from mac and cheese to banana and Nutella.
They made lots of friends and captured many headlines over the years. Wilson was frequently interviewed by national and international press for stories on things like how the 2019 government shutdown was affecting small business.
“I look back with only good memories,” she said. “It was really hard work but such joy and it was all very successful, too, especially with us starting such a thing so late in life. It was the adventure of a lifetime. I don’t regret a single minute of it.”
Anyone who wants more information about buying the business can contact Wilson at parsnipitycafe@gmail.com.
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