South Street Smoke House I Food Truck

Designer: Hannah J Schneider
Project Type: Student Project
School: Ball State University
Professor: Ryan James
Packaging Contents: BBQ Ribs, Pulled Meat (optional Bun), Brisket, and Sides

This food truck project is for South Street Smoke House, a BBQ restaurant from Lafayette, IN. It is a family-friendly place with a homey wall-mounted environment and it is located beyond a shut-down railroad track. They are known as Lafayette’s best BBQ place and for their iconic cornbread. This food truck aims to expand this restaurant’s audience beyond Lafayette’s reach through expressive textures, incorporate the city history, and re-craft the BBQ get-together experience.

The re-brand holds itself to these key terms: rough, humorous, and forward. The logo takes inspiration from its railroad location to take in the city’s history. It includes the house symbol from their old logo that acts like both an arrow (to point towards the location) and a smokehouse. The rough texture is to evoke the grill charcoal lines and smokey flavor. In addition, the illustration style and color palette reimagine the action of putting BBQ sauce on the food. It is a standard forward action that incorporates the customer into BBQ culture. The good smoked meats are the blank white canvas and the BBQ sauce is the spark of color/flavor. And to top it all off, a humor mechanism mimics the interaction that can happen at a family BBQ. Since the restaurant already markets itself as Lafayette’s best BBQ place, it is crucial to carry this community aspect with some witty puns.

Putting this design in-action, the brush texture moves the eye around the food truck. The most common food menu items are on the non-order side with a general BBQ community pun. On the ordering side, there are ‘order’ and ‘pick up’ arrows to guide traffic along with a menu QR code. The menu also on outdoor signs designed for close, far, and mid-distance to where customers are in line. BBQ sauce bottles are on this side of the truck; since this is where consumers will get to involve themselves in the brand by putting on their sauces for their order.

The to-go containers are sturdy cardboard with liners to prevent soggy boxes. The boxes have grill lines on top so when consumer open the container, it is like they’re opening up their food right from the grill. The top of the containers are labeled with what food item is inside and its specifications to communicate clearly to both the workers and customers what should be inside the box.

Overall, South Street Smokehouse food truck would reach new and expanding audiences with its rough, humorous, and forward nature. Its playful design ultimately imitates the possible sauce stains for savory memories. All this to show, that ‘Real BBQ Eats’.