THE BIG GREEN TRUCK STORY: 
NEW ENGLANDS ORIGINAL CATERING PIZZA TRUCK

“I was neither a fan of pizza nor of old trucks when I started this business,” says Mr. Coffin. “I have always loved baking bread, and at one point I began experimenting with baking in a wood-fired oven.” He credits the Bread and Puppet Theater with starting him on mobile ovens. A Vermont based theater troop, they make a whole grain sourdough bread in a wood-fired oven and serve it to the audience as part of every performance. On a trip to New Haven, they built a small oven on the green which they then dismantled the next day. Mr. Coffin was doing a small wedding for someone a few weeks later. Since New Haven is often very humid in the summer and bread crusts quickly sog out, he thought it would be neat to build an oven in the clients’ driveway and bake the bread right there while the ceremony was taking place. The fact that he had no skills as a mason did not seem to trouble him. The oven was a failure – it cracked, held heat poorly and cooked unevenly, and but the bread was a hit. Everyone said he should do this all the time.

A period of experimentation followed. The plan as it was being developed, was to do loaves of bread for large events. Show up at the venue with a pile of bricks, a load of firewood, and bread dough. Build the oven, fire it up, bake a round of bread to serve as appetizers with an assortment of cheeses. Then, while guests are snacking on those items, the oven would be refired, loaded with a loaf of bread for every table, and then as the guests were called to their places, the oven would be unloaded and fresh bread delivered to each table. This was not a hit. When explaining the idea to other caterers who would be the ones to book this as part of their large events, Mr. Coffin would get as far as saying he would build a fire in a homemade oven at someone’s multi-million dollar house and the presentation would stop. “Couldn’t you just deliver the bread to us in the morning” or a simple “no” was typically heard at this point.

Word did get out that there was a wood fired oven on that someone had built on a trailer and Mr. Coffin began to get requests for pizzas. As he says “I didn’t know anything about pizza so I would try to sell them on the bread idea but you don’t get anywhere by saying no in the catering business.” A neighbor wanted to do a pizza party for her son, having spent a lot of time watching Coffin and gang cook was well known to the staff so the party was on. The pizza was a huge hit – everyone enjoyed watching the pizzas getting made, talking about their favorite pizzas, gathering around the wood fire and enjoying the fresh hot pies. “I thought about that party a lot in the following months. I had never done pizzas as part of a catering job, but there was a food that could be served straight from the oven, made in an infinite variety of styles to please any demographic, and produced with a minimum of equipment. It was a food that needed no long explanation to sell, nor was there any need to worry about making dishes that everyone could share – someone doesn’t eat meat, no problem making a vegetable pie, don’t like garlic, I’ll leave it off on this pie. It made catering so much easier.” It did, however, require a better oven and a bigger truck.

About the truck: the first truck was a 1942 GMC half ton pick up. “When I started with the homemade oven on the trailer, I pulled it with my wife’s Volvo wagon. It was not happy. I began to search for something better to use as a tow vehicle. I had about $5,000 to spend. My first thought was an old Suburban but for $5,000 you got a rusted hulk that would maybe last a few years. My eyes kept getting drawn to the special vehicles section of the paper where all the interesting stuff was. There I spotted this cute old pick up. It would certainly tow the trailer. It wouldn’t go fast, but then I didn’t want to go fast with a brick oven on a homemade trailer. It wasn’t going to be any good in the snow or rain but then the oven wouldn’t be good then either. It had style and it wasn’t going to depreciate any further as it got older so I could use it and sell it later for what I paid for it. So began the love affair with old trucks.

When I began to think about a pizza truck, I felt it should be an old vehicle. Pizza is an old food. The wood-fired oven was an old technology. This was not modern, high tech, stainless steel, white glove catering. This was simple, rustic cooking and I thought the truck should reflect that. I grew up around old farms that were being torn up and replaced with modern subdivisions. I wanted to capture some of the spirits of those old farms. I am not Italian and I didn’t want to pretend to be so the aesthetic would be rural American. I had a great deal of fun for several weeks looking at old trucks online. My wife, Kathy, would come down for breakfast and there would be a pile of pictures of different possibles. She would move them out of the way without much comment. I had a fondness for the ones from the thirties – the gas light style headlamps on bicycle fenders over wooden wheels – but I couldn’t see them holding up to regular use. I rejected the 60’s as too current (they were what I had when I was growing up – that’s not old). The fifties era seemed too much of a cliche. I was drawn to the forties in part because you don’t see much from those days – in part because a large part of the decade was given over to war production. The late forties was a period of experimentation by Ford and Chevy as they tried out a variety of ideas for grills and bumpers, many of which were somewhat odd. International, however, had a fairly simple design which seemed classic but not tied to any particular period or style. They were a big part of the small truck market then and widely available.

I found our first one in Wallingford where it had been a pumper in the Yalesville fire department. We began the process of restoring and converting it to our use. The cab was taken off the frame and sent to a local automotive restorer – Colorite in Bethany. The world of restoring antique vehicles is a strange one and I began to get a good idea of the differences between its norms and my goals when the owner called and asked me how much I wanted him to buff out the underside of the fenders. I did not understand the question, why would you spend any time polishing the underside of a truck fender? This was not going to be a show vehicle I said. No one except the mechanic will ever see the underside of the fenders. Luckily, I had found a mechanic, Chuck Hilton, who had a love for old farm machinery and actually thought things should be used. He rebuilt all the mechanical systems of the truck and fabricated most of the items on the back. He would never have been able to bring this idea to fruition had it not been for his talent, his ingenuity, his knowledge and his hard work.

There are some other people who played a key role in bringing this project to life. Manuel Ayala, an architect who I met through our kid’s school, drew the first sketch of the working part of the truck on the back of a cocktail napkin at a party and helped sort out a lot of the ideas as to what this truck should be and do. Mike Dunn at the Eli Whitney Museum designed our tables. As Doug tells it “I’m not much of a mechanic but I grew up with a do it yourself Dad who taught me some elementary woodworking skills. I had the idea of making the wooden sides of the truck transform into tables and spent a couple of weeks working on various ideas of how to do that. Stuck on a particular joint that I couldn’t get right, I stopped into the museum for some advice. Mike was immediately taken with the idea of the truck and the tables and equally adamant in his dismissal of the design I had come up with.

One of the reasons the truck is a success is that I learned to take the advice of people who knew a lot more than I did. Mike said he would come up with something better and it is his design that we use today.” Advocate Press – unfortunately no longer around – designed the signage for me. I was struggling with ideas for a name and a way of conveying graphically what this vehicle was. I tried some modern style sketches centered on the oven but it seemed too cold. Then one night I was looking at pictures of old produce labels. They seemed to capture the era and style I was going for. I noticed that many of the designs had a window or portal that acted as a transition between two different things. I began to develop an idea based on the oven as a portal between the current world and the older world of the farm. The pizza truck was a vehicle for connecting the two. It would be driving out of the oven and the road that it was on would become the pizza paddle. Many of the names on the old labels had very simple descriptive names, Big Green Truck Pizza would be mine. I explained all this to the staff at Advocate Press and the nailed it on their first attempt.I wish I could remember the names of the two individuals who worked on the project so I could give them the credit they so deserve.

No matter how tall we think we are, we stand on the shoulders of many others. Lots of others have contributed to the development of our operation. I have mentioned the ones I have because of their stories illuminate particular facets of our operation that are unique and whose origin might be of general interest. The efforts of others unmentioned are no less appreciated and no less significant and I thank you all.

- Doug Coffin, founder.