MANSFIELD — Smokin’ Bros BBQ is giving the nearly 5,000 employees in Mansfield’s industrial park an additional lunch option.
This week the mobile food trailer parked on MHS Industrial Supply’s parking lot at 70 Sawyer Parkway from 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m.
“It’s a great lunch demographic,” proprietor Dan Coy said. “There’s a lot of businesses in the industrial park and they have limited lunch options.
“I’m not digging on Subway, but that’s basically their only option. And some of these guys only have 20 minutes for lunch, which makes it almost impossible to go out anywhere.”
The food trailer’s tagline, he said, is “cooked slow, served fast.”
The menu offers pulled pork and beef brisket sandwiches, baby back ribs, coleslaw, baked beans, corn bread, potato salad, macaroni and cheese and banana pudding.
MHS Industrial Supply Sales Manager Brad Downs said the company invited the food trailer to the parking lot, free of a rent charge.
“We’re always looking for ways to get more customers out here. We’re sort of off the beaten path. We thought this was a way to do that while also promoting a local restaurant,” Downs said.
The locally owned BBQ joint has been in business for three years. Just before Christmas, owner Coy and his wife opened a sit-down-style restaurant at their Park Avenue location next to Empress Express, where they first started serving.
Coy said adding locations around the Mansfield area was part of the business plan. He hinted a move to the industrial park in a Richland Source story in December. Depending on the food trailer’s popularity, he plans on serving five days per week.
Additional food trailers are possible, said Coy, who moved to the area from Dublin in 2000 after working in the telecommunications industry.
“I sold the last of my start-ups and decided to move out to the country,” he said.
He and his wife, Denise, found a house near Pleasant Hill Lake.
“We love it out there,” he said.
The businessman hopes to someday create a franchise out of the Smokin’ Bros BBQ brand.
“It would be killer business in Columbus or Cleveland, or another larger metropolitan statistical area,” he said. “We’ll see. We’re pleased with the response we’ve gotten in Mansfield so far. I can’t say enough about our customers.”
For more information on the food trailers’ locations during special events, visit their Facebook page or their website.
