On April 11, the grade 7 Culinary Arts Program at Airdrie Christian Academy held a food truck competition. The food trucks are based off ideas the students at the Airdrie Christian Academy created themselves for a classroom project.  

Jillian Janzen, the teacher and organizer of this food truck competition, says the students have been adding new stuff to the project every week in preparation for the competition.  

Janzen was looking for people to come and judge the contest and the post she made to social media ended up blowing up and gaining a lot of attention; more than Jillian was expecting. The competition was able to get many volunteers to show up to judge the contest. Some volunteers showed up in their food trucks and some brought prizes. One of the volunteers was named Lesley Stasiuk and says she was very glad to judge the contest.

“The kids learn right from the beginning of taking a concept of a food truck to build the outside of the truck, the inside of the truck, the menus, the social media, the recipes, and gather the data for what their food costs,” says Stasiuk. 

Part of the work the students did in preparation for this competition included creating their own menus and logos for the food truck.  At one point they were also required to build a model of a food truck using cardboard.  

One of the food truck ideas the student came up with is based off chicken and tropical foods. William, one of the students, says another food truck at the competition will had multicultural foods based on the cultures three of the students are from.  

“It's basically just like multicultural because me and my two other partners come from three completely different cultures. Newfoundlander and French, Guyanese, and South African.” 

A Taste of Diversity is a multicultural food truck with popular food items from those three different cultures. The principal of Aidrie Christian Academy, Earl Driedger, says the students were able to learn a lot from this competition.  

“It teaches them how to market, it also gives them personal presentation skills, how to present with confidence and clarity, to understand what they are selling and it provides an opportunity for them to grow and improve.”  

The students who participated in the competition say they were nervous in the days leading up to the event but once they got out there and saw all the other food, their nerves went away. One of the students was named Martha and says she liked to serve the food to the judges to see if they were enjoying it.  

“We worked really hard on it and then everyone else started building up and we started to feel really confident about it.” 

Janzen says she came up with the idea for this competition herself but Googling and using other concepts. She wanted to teach the students about food in a competitive way so that the students were engaged in their learning.  

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