New food truck, Ambition Coffee, offers hot, cold drinks
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Jul. 13—TUPELO — For almost 20 years, Lena Conwill sat behind a desk at Timber Lake Foods, where she was a commodities broker.
In December, she left that job and her sedentary lifestyle to open a food truck, called Ambition Coffee MS.
"I felt like I needed to do something where I was active, and I needed something to restore my soul," said Conwill, 56. "I love coffee, and I thought having a trailer would give me the freedom to go places and do things."
Conwill joined a lot of social media groups on Facebook and TikTok to get the lowdown on food trucks, and earlier this year, she decided to go for it.
"I first went to Florence, Alabama, and picked up an old Scotty camper," she said. "I thought it would be cool, and retro. After I got it, I found all sorts of meth pipes in there, so it just wasn't doable. Anytime you learn, you make mistakes. That was a mistake."
Conwill, who lives in Mooreville, next found an old electrician's trailer on Facebook.
"We took everything out, and started gutting it," she said. "My dad and my brother helped with the electrical work. All my buddies, my brother-in-law, put in sweat equity and did whatever the health department asked for."
Conwill knew early on she wanted a food truck, and not a permanent location. Her wife, Julia "Star" Newsom, used to have Starting Over Coffee Shop on South Green Street in Tupelo.
"I like not having to pay brick-and-mortar rent, and I wanted to be more available to my family," Conwill said. "Plus, I just wanted something that was mine."
Conwill is a big fan of country singer Dolly Parton, and she named her business after a line from the movie "9 to 5," where Parton sings, " ... pour myself a cup of ambition ..." in the title song.
"I'm a big proponent of what Dolly does," Conwill said. "She grew up in poverty but always knew she could come out of that situation. The women in my family can do whatever we want to, if we're willing to work for it."
Ambition Coffee MS is open from 7 to 10 a.m. Monday through Friday. The truck is usually parked in the parking lot of either Dairy Kream on East Main, the Fox Den on South Gloster or Cornerstone Tupelo, a church on Briar Ridge Road. Conwill uses social media to post her location daily.
"This to me is a morning-time kind of business, so I shut down around 10," Conwill said. "Then I can go later on in the afternoon to the ball fields and set up there. I don't feel like this is a lunch place."
Conwill offers hot coffee drinks, like Americano, cappuccino, latte, mocha and drip coffee, as well as frozen coffees like mocha, caramel and vanilla bean.
"If you want an iced latte, I use cold brew that I make on my trailer," she said. "I also do frozen blended coffees, similar to what Starbucks calls its Frappuccino."
Later this week, Ambition Coffee MS will start offering a few breakfast items, prepared by Kitchen 107, a catering company in Nettleton.
"I had hoped to do drop biscuits in the trailer from my grandmother's recipe, but it was just too difficult because of space and electricity constraints," Conwill said. "Kitchen 107 will be doing a monkey bread muffin and a sausage, egg and cheese slider. Talbot House Bakery will also be doing food for us later on."
Conwill said since she opened her business a month ago, she's had some really good days and some really bad days.
"I think everything that could possibly go wrong has gone wrong," she said. "The generator has gone down, the AC was out for two weeks, I got COVID. The first day I was open, I went home and sat in my recliner and cried. Then, I realized I just needed to suck it up, figure it out, and stay in the solution, instead of the problem. So that's what I did."
