Food pods are gaining popularity nearly everywhere, many offering a variety of tasty cuisines from around the world.
In Woodburn, the city council is setting the stage for the city to join in on the food pod craze.
“Our zoning code didn’t allow what most people think of as a food cart pod, a big collection of food carts that you have in one place with a central eating area,” Chris Kerr, city community development director, said. “We’ve allowed them in industrial areas, but we didn’t have any regulations. We would allow trucks to operate with bare minimum requirements.”
Kerr said individual food cart owners have been using, for the past three or four years, a provision in the code that allowed some to open for up to 60 days, whenever they want.
“They would, on and off, open their doors, shut down, open their doors, shut down, essentially the truck would be there for a year,” he said, noting, for example, that these trucks might be open every other Saturday.
“What we had wasn’t working well, a bit of an eyesore,” Kerr said. “It was really hard to regulate, in terms of code enforcement.”