From a post-pregnancy craving to a pink ambulance, one food truck has captured the hearts of Kansans and the internet.
Now, Pretzelly Truck owner Allyssa Foster is taking the next big step to open a brick-and-mortar location in the strip mall at 711 W. 23rd St.
Foster plans to get the keys on Aug. 15 and hopes to open it by mid-November. A second truck is also in the works, meaning metro-area fans may soon spot two pink pretzel rigs rolling through town.
“I have literally already started going so intense,” Foster said as she prepares for the new spot. “I’m very nervous about all of it … but it is going to be phenomenal.”
Don’t miss a beat … Click here to sign up for our email newsletters
Click here to learn more about our newsletters first
The expansion comes as the business hits a new gear in its third year.
Foster said the truck now regularly sells upwards of 250 pretzels per outing — up from 100 to 150 last year — and goes through thousands of custom boxes each month. In July 2025, she was able to quit her nine-to-five and run the truck full time.
The storefront wasn’t the original plan, but now Foster hopes it will become the “third space” she’s always wanted to build.
Please support
The Lawrence Times!
Subscribe here.
The location won out over downtown Lawrence and new builds on Clinton Parkway, she said, because the trucks need to be able to dock behind the building, stock up and charge. The former Sarpino’s Pizzeria space, with its existing restaurant infrastructure, mostly needs refacing.
Her plan is for her current team to run the storefront while she builds out a second rig for next spring.
“We’ll take over the world one pretzel at a time,” Foster said.
Pretzel-ly, the adjective
The leap to a storefront caps a rise that began, improbably, with a single inedible pretzel.
The American-inspired Bavarian pretzel truck first launched in the spring of 2023 after Foster, breastfeeding her then-8-month-old daughter, had an intense craving for a soft pretzel.
Living in Baldwin, she was roughly 40 minutes from the nearest place she considered worth the drive.
“We made them at home at one time. I bet I could do it again,” she said. However, “I could not do it again … they were really gross.”
The next day, she bought the first Pretzelly trailer — even though her husband said her previous night’s attempts “were not edible” or sellable.
“It was partly like I was a mom, like a new mom … I was kind of bored. I needed something for myself,” said Foster.
She called herself a habitual entrepreneur, having done lemonade stands and pallet auctions, made pandemic masks and flipped apartment furniture.
The first trailer, sanded and handpainted, gave way to something much bigger: an old ambulance-turned-food truck, then wrapped in the now-unmistakable pink.
The $7,000 wrap, she said, was “one of the singlehanded best decisions we’ve ever done for our branding.”
After 86 recipe variations, the final product is a sweet Bavarian pretzel.
“The big thing that makes it Bavarian is actually the lye dip that you dip them in,” she said. “And because we use sugar in our dough, we get a much darker brown color… we get that really nice Maillard reaction.”
The lye, she said, is what gives her pretzels their “pretzel-ly” flavor.
Pink is the new black
But it is not just the pretzel that keeps bringing people back. It is Foster herself — the brand and the community that has been built around the bright pink pretzel truck.
Foster said her decision behind the color was because there weren’t very many pink trucks, but also because of the Flamingo Theory.
When flamingo parents have chicks, they lose their pink color. As the babies become less dependent on their parents, the flamingos get their pink back.
“It’s kind of a symbolic thing for a lot of moms,” Foster said.
Now it’s the whole identity — the truck, the SUV, the packaging, the hair, her household.
“It was almost for me like reclaiming,” she said. “I can be kind of rough and tumble and still like pink. I can build my own food trucks and still like pink. I can know how to do electrical work and still like pink.”
Her viral moment arrived in May 2025, when a TikTok of her buying soda from Dillons went viral, leading to a chain reaction of millions of views on her other videos.
“I’m a little bit weird. I’m a little bit quirky, and people just liked to see it,” she said.
She went viral again in January after posting that “ICE sucks and shouldn’t kill people and shouldn’t exist.” The willingness to use her platform resonated widely.
What she values most, though, isn’t the views. It’s the community that has grown in the lines. She’s met pregnant customers, then their babies, then celebrated those babies’ first birthdays.
Her team has grown, too. She has six employees who work a range of hours from part time to full time.
Everything the truck serves — pretzels and lemonade, aka “pinkade” — is handmade. Leftovers go to staff first, then local hospitals, firehouses and police stations. Foster is even hunting for a use for the hundreds of pounds of lemon rinds the truck churns through weekly.
“There’s so many people who cannot eat on the day-to-day,” she said. “There’s no reason that there should be food hitting a trash can.”
Her advice to anyone dreaming of a food truck of their own: work in one first.
“Go work it for like a year before you do anything,” she said. “Make sure you actually love it.”
And then, as she has from the very first inedible batch: follow your gut.
“Every time I have wanted something, I have had people in my ear telling me ‘Don’t do it,’” she said. “But for me, it has always worked out.”
If local news matters to you, please help us keep doing this work.
Don’t miss a beat — get the latest news from the Times delivered to your inbox:
Click here to learn more about our newsletters first
Courtney Lane (she/her), reporting correspondent, has worked with The Lawrence Times since April 2026. Originally from Arkansas, she’s a graduate of KU’s Journalism school, where she worked as a reporter, opinion section editor, and eventually editor-in-chief for The Kansan.
Read her work for the Times at this link, and see her photography for the Times at this link.
Latest Lawrence news:
Cuyler Dunn/Lawrence Times
