News
Food truck serves up opportunities for youth

BRISTOL — A new food truck in Bristol is looking to offer more than a good bite to eat.
The BEATs Eats food truck is run by Bristol resident Daniel Lyons and is aimed at providing employment, advocacy and support for a diverse cohort of local youth.
Lyons has worked as a special educator with middle and high school students for 21 years and said he’s always appreciated creating opportunities for students.
“In my years doing that, for some students after they get out of structured high school programs or high schools, the opportunities to continue to engage them is few and far between,” Lyons said. “I’ve always wanted to create opportunities for the youth that I worked with beyond what was offered to them through the school.”
Lyons said he’s also long wanted to open his own business and has had various ideas about what that could look like. But his work as a special educator has taken up the bulk of his time, and he hadn’t previously been able to dive into a project.
More recently, however, he began to explore what it would take to launch an employment-related service for youth who’ve just graduated high school and need more direct assistance, and his two goals meshed.
“It would have been complicated to do that at the same time as being a special educator, and I wasn’t necessarily ready to jump ship from being a special educator,” Lyons said. “I was just continuing to do this research, and then my friend sent me an ad for this food truck.”
Running a food truck had always been a part of Lyons’s idea for the work he wanted to do, as the truck could be used to provide work for youth in need of employment-related training options.
Several months later, the stars aligned when Lyons was able to purchase the food truck from Joshin Byrnes and the Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community. The group had previously used food truck for StreetGreens, an offering providing free meals and snacks in places where people gather to build community.
“I appreciate that about (the truck), that I’m refurbishing a truck that has gone through many purposes,” Lyons said. “It has a history.”
Lyons, who will continue to work as a special educator, plans also to continue using the food truck to serve the community. His goal is to provide employment-related opportunities for those who need it through BEATS Eats. BEATS is the name of Lyons’s LLC, which stands for Burgers Educational And Transition Services.
He plans to set up shop in Bristol once a month and said ideally, he’ll have at least one person in need of employment working with the food truck in some way.
“The whole plan for BEATS Eats is to be more of a service for folks who need it than a culinary endeavor,” Lyons explained. “I’m not a cook and I’m not a business owner, so jumping into buying a food truck. I have a lot to learn.”
The food truck doesn’t yet have a set menu. Lyons said the truck’s offerings will differ each month and his goal is to keep it simple.
“If I’m able to do that then I can focus more on making the other aspect of my business come to light, which is providing services to others,” he said.
Lyons didn’t want the business to become a private entity, nor ask families to pay out of pocket for services provided through the venture. Thus, navigating the details of the venture has been a challenge.
In recent months, Lyons has begun establishing the truck’s presence around town, setting up shop at the Bristol Collaborative Campus during a music event over the summer, serving burritos to passersby on Halloween outside Smoke & Lola’s, and handing out hot chocolate and candied nuts during Bristol’s Lumen Celebration.
In November, Lyons and his son, Sawyer, doled out soup at the Bristol Collaborative Campus. Lyons said soup has proven to be a good fit for the truck, and he plans to continue offering it throughout the winter.
The team is narrowing down what the menu will look like come spring, with paninis, gourmet grilled cheese and lemonade or ice cream as possibilities.
Lyons is looking to connect with an entity that he could set up shop at on a long-term basis. He wants to avoid being in direct competition with other food vendors, so he wants to ensure BEATS Eats’s offerings are unique to the area it’s serving. Some ideas for potential locations include concert venues, sporting events and local schools.
The food truck is open to all local youth in the Addison County area. How involved youth are in the end-to-end operations of the truck will depend on the individual and what they’re looking to get out of it.
“I like the idea of being able to create opportunities for folks of all sorts of profiles,” Lyons said.
Lyons noted he isn’t able to offer fulltime employment, as the food truck is operating once a month with the potential to ramp up to possibly once a week during the summer. Thus, how many local youths he’s able to employ will depend on how much they’re looking to work.
He wants to collaborate with local organizations that work with or support youth — like the Bristol Hub Teen Center or the Hannaford Career Center — to connect with people who might benefit from this kind of opportunity.
“Partnering with folks like that could really help me advertise to the folks that would need this type of support,” Lyons said.
Collaborating with such an entity could also provide opportunities for several youths to get involved in different aspects of running the truck, from food prep to set-up. Lyons said he’s currently looking for partners to collaborate with and has reached out to professional caterers as well as communities supporting those in need of employment-related opportunities.
Lyons’s larger business plans include developing something akin to a specialized service agency that works with the state to provide employment-related services. Specialized service agencies are organizations that offer developmental disabilities services “through either a distinctive approach to service delivery and coordination or to meet distinctive individual needs.”
“The food truck could very well be just the initial step to participation through services, and then as I get to know folks who are working with me, I can help them build the skills that they would need to then look for other employment elsewhere,” Lyons explained. “My services ideally, if I was fully functioning, could then provide that onsite support at different locations, too.”
In the meantime, Lyons is starting slow and focusing on running the food truck. He’s secured a permit to set up shop once a month at the Bristol Town Green. Community members can catch BEATS Eats there on Jan. 20 from 5 to 7 p.m. for beef and vegetarian chili and can keep an eye out for more information on Front Porch Forum.
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