Food trucks reshaping street eats in Rochester

When Jessica Toner was a kid, she loved the shaved ices and slushies she got at fairs and festivals.

Now, as a young mother of twin toddlers, the city resident wanted to share that cool joy with her girls, but without the high-fructose corn syrup, artificial colors and other ingredients that she consumed by default years ago.

So Toner, a devoted locavore, bought a shaved ice maker, began making simple syrups with fresh fruit and vegetable juices and purees from local farms and her backyard garden. For sweetening, she used sugar, honey and other natural sweeteners.

Wanting to share the cool treats with other like-minded families, she and her husband, Mike, purchased and refurbished a 1964 Shasta Trailer. Snow Daze, as their mobile shaved ice business is called, is now drawing lines at the Sunday Brighton Farmers Market and the Thursday evening South Wedge Farmers Market.

Flavors include orange pineapple, peach oolong (made with seconds from a local fruit farmer), tart cherry and Concord grape (also locally sourced).

"It's definitely not your average snow cone," says Chad Oliveiri, a first-time Snow Daze customer at the South Wedge Farmers Market. "These things taste as good as they look."

Touting a flowery apron, vintage 1950s and '60s kitchenalia and a sweet gee-gosh demeanor, Toner could be Rochester's June Cleaver of the 21st-century food truck movement.

"The idea of food trucks intrigues me. I want to inspire other small-food entrepreneurs to do the same," says Toner, who also runs Artistic Eats, a food distribution business, with her husband.

Toner has been studying the food truck movement in other cities, and she believes it's Rochester's turn to get rolling. She joins a growing and creative convoy of mobile food vendors who are scanning Craigslist for old delivery trucks or vans, outfitting them with miniature kitchens, then coming up with original recipes.

All that's left is to navigate to festivals, farmers markets, fairs, nightclub districts after hours and wherever else they can find street-food fans willing to line up and eat without a table.