Cedric’s Coffee Truck is open every Saturday at 12th and Edgefield from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., and donates 100% of their tips to local dog rescues.
“I think we’ve carved out a really unique space that is not Bishop Arts, not quite Elmwood, not quite like Illinois or Kiest or anything like that,” owner Erin Ortegon says. “It’s just this really sweet spot where there’s not a whole lot of like restaurants or commercial spaces, and so we’ve been very well received.”
The truck is named after Ortegon’s dog Cedric, who she adopted in the last semester of her senior year of college. Cedric passed away last November and was Ortegon’s driving reason behind being an advocate for rescues and adoption.
Cedric had been with Ortegon for almost 14 years. She got him in Austin, brought him back home to San Antonio, and then they moved to Dallas about seven and a half years ago.
Ortegon says she always wanted to open some kind of coffee shop or deli once she moved to Dallas. She couldn’t find a favorite coffee shop in the city, so she talked to her husband and decided to start her own spot.
“We kind of started thinking about, ‘Well, what would that look like?’ and building out a business plan and figuring out, ‘Will they even let us sell their coffee?’” Ortegon says. “So we reached out to Wild Gift, and they said yes, and we went down there and did a full coffee tasting. And so while we were doing all that, we were also figuring out, ‘Do we want a brick-and-mortar shop, or do we want a coffee truck?’”
Coming from San Antonio and Austin where food trucks are very popular, they decided to pick the latter.
“We started pricing out trucks, and we finally found a place out in Georgia that actually built our truck for us, exactly like specs to what we needed, for the espresso machine, stuff like that,” Ortegon says.
They knew they wanted dogs to be at the forefront of their business. Ortegon opened Cedric’s in April 2024 and decided to donate their tips to a different local rescue organization every month.