Fast food on the go
- USA - Specialist mobile business fabricator Cruising Kitchens has created a custom food truck for the Raising Cane’s chicken finger restaurant chain, which was designed ‘not only to deliver delicious food but also to get the party started’. The fully functioning mobile kitchen also features a custom-designed pop-up DJ booth on the roof, which is surrounded on three sides by ADJ weatherproof LED video panels.
Already operating from over 500 restaurants in 29 states and territories, they are moving into more areas, thanks to a pair of custom food trucks. The trucks were delivered at the end of 2020, as a surprise for the company’s founder, Todd Graves, from his co-CEO, AJ Kumaran, to celebrate the brand’s 25th anniversary. They are now making their way across the US, as part of the Cane’s Across America campaign, visiting areas not yet served by a Raising Cane’s restaurant.
A true ‘rags to riches’ story, Graves came up with the idea for a restaurant chain focused on delivering quick, delicious chicken finger meals while in college. The concept received the worst grade in a Business Plan class and was rejected every time Todd presented it to a bank. Undeterred, he worked hard to save enough of his own money to open his first store in August 1996 from which the business rapidly expanded. Despite now operating from over 500 locations, a hallmark of Raising Cane’s is individuality. Every restaurant is unique, with 100s of distinctive details, which is something AJ and his team were keen to see replicated in their food trucks.
Cameron Davies, the president and CEO of Cruising Kitchens, has setup a 64,000sq.ft one-stop shop in San Antonio, TX and assembled a team especially for the task of designing and fabricating epic food trucks and other custom mobile business vehicles.
A key aspect of this latest vehicle was the audio and visual installation, which is where Joshua Davies, Cruising Kitchen’s director of operation & A/V specialist, came in.
“Raising Cane’s didn’t just want a food truck,” Joshua explains. “They asked us to create an all-inclusive entertainment vehicle, so audio and video was a big part of this project. They wanted to be able pull up to somewhere and provide a full party experience along with the food.”
The LED video panel model selected for this project was the ADJ AV4IP, which features a configuration of RGB SMD1921 LEDs with a pixel pitch of 4.81mm. Offering an impressive 4000NITS of brightness and two LED modules per panel for easy serviceability, each panel contains 104 x 104 LEDs, which is equivalent to 43,264/m2. The panel has a wide viewing angle of 140-degrees as well as an IP65-rated front and IP54-rated back, making it ideal for outdoor use.
For Raising Cane’s flagship food truck, the Cruising Kitchens team created three custom frames, each designed to accommodate three AV4IP panels side-by-side, to form the front and sides of the rooftop DJ booth. These frames were mounted to the roof of the vehicle on articulated brackets that allow the booth to fold down, with the panels sitting over each other, so that they can be securely strapped down for transit.

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