How's your favorite food cart's hygiene? New King County rules aim to make that transparent

The King County Board of Health has voted to expand food safety rules to make it easier to identify food vendors without permits, starting next year.

The new rules approved on Thursday would require bakeries, food carts, and catering businesses that have received county-issued food-handling permits to display their ratings. Those are the smiley-face signs you see in many restaurants' windows, letting customers know what they've scored during their most recent inspections.

King County has recently seen a rise of people who have started their own food carts and pop-ups, often unpermitted, selling snacks and a variety of food. They've found success — and increasing closures. Over the past year, dozens of unpermitted vendors have been closed in Seattle and beyond, from tamale vendors selling out of the back of their cars to fruit-cup vendors at Alki Beach.

For vendors abiding by the local food health standards, it's not much of a change, but it will make it easier to single out places that aren't certified.

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Marcos Arellano said he sees it from both sides. He runs Sharkbite Ceviches in front of El Centro de La Raza on Beacon Hill. In that neighborhood, three unpermitted food carts have been closed since August.

Arellano started out selling ceviche to his friends. With the help of his accountant and El Centro, he expanded his operation into an official business, with all the necessary health and administrative permits.

On the business side, he said, more regulations could reduce some of the competition for brick-and-mortar businesses and, to some degree, his own food cart.

“But on the human side, [unpermitted vendors] are people who want to get ahead in life, and maybe they need more information,” Arellano said in Spanish.

But running a business like his also requires a level of financial investment. Arellano's cart alone cost around $3,000. His minimalist, cold food setup helps him comply with county guidelines for food storage temperatures. That doesn't include permitting that can take months to get through, he added.

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Arellano joked that the standards are so high, he might as well be running a restaurant.

Eyob Mazengia, who manages the food safety inspectors at Public Health —Seattle and King County, laid out three key considerations to get permitted, especially for carts and caterers:

• Food needs to be prepared and stored at a commercial kitchen that has been verified by health inspectors.
• The food carts need to have gone through an inspection and shown they have access to enough clean water, cold and hot. They must also show that dirty water isn’t going to contaminate food or be poured out into the street.
• The food needs to be stored at adequate temperatures, and vendors also need to know how to safely handle food before serving it to people.

The permitting process to start a food cart or stand is cumbersome, said Jorge Guzman Pioquinto. He’s one of the reasons you may see soap bubbles floating around the downtown Waterfront Park on the weekends.

Guzman Pioquinto wanted to operate a food cart after he lost his job but decided it was easier to sell soap guns instead. He's already tried to get into the food business with the help of a local nonprofit to no luck so far, he said.

“They just have me going in circles,” Guzman Pioquinto said in Spanish. “They tell me that it’s a process, but they don’t tell me when to present myself or what kind of identification I need.”

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The task at hand for county health inspectors is to differentiate the vendors who need help with access to resources from those who choose to not follow the rules. They want to connect people to the resources vendors need to follow the health code, said Mazengia with Public Health — Seattle and King County.

“'Permitting' is [a] very loaded term,” Mazengia said. “It is not just paperwork. It is really one way of verifying that they have all of the minimum requirements, at least the minimum requirements, to be able to safely sell food to the public.”

With the right resources, he said many people do end up getting the help they need to successfully follow food safety regulations.