The archive · Small Business & Money · Product decision · 2024–2026
Food truck Dragon Wagon sells Labubus beside banh mi — fans call it the Labubu truck
Kansas City's first Vietnamese food truck adds scarce Labubu blind boxes, drawing toy hunters who turn a 3-minute food line into a 10-minute memory.
Dragon Wagon KC · KC Monsters
What it had to solve
After losing her car dealership in the pandemic, Ling Vong launched Kansas City's first Vietnamese food truck in 2024. Wanting a merch hook that would make the truck unmissable, she started selling Labubus before the toys hit the US mainstream.
How it works
Ling Vong grew up in her parents' Chinese restaurants, ran a car dealership, then lost it during COVID. Noticing that food stayed open while everything else closed, she pitched a food tent; her husband suggested a food truck instead. She bought a trailer in Alabama, hauled it to Kansas City, and in 2024 launched Dragon Wagon — the city's first Vietnamese food truck.
To stand out she wanted merch, and found it in Labubus — the Hong Kong artist Kasing Lung's plush collectibles — before they became a US craze. Sourcing was brutal: she traveled to Asia, once paying $150 for an amusement-park ticket just to earn a place in line, then filled her luggage while proving to customs the toys were genuine. Back home she sold blind boxes from the truck, turning a three-minute food line into a ten-minute event: kids pull boxes while parents order pho, photos get taken, stories get shared.
It worked almost too well. When Blackpink's Lisa put Labubus in front of American audiences, demand exploded — adults queued and fought for boxes in front of her, and the truck became known as the 'Labubu truck.' Vong spun the toy venture into its own brand, KC Monsters, to keep the food truck identity intact, and started hunting for the next trend as the market filled up.
Why it lands
- A food truck needs a reason for customers to drive to it; a scarce collectible creates urgency no menu can.
- Blind boxes turn a commodity transaction into a shared, photogenic moment worth posting.
- Vong sourced before the mainstream wave, buying stock no local competitor had.
- Keeping the toy line as a separate brand protected the food truck from being defined by a passing fad.
What it did
Demand 'quickly got crazy': the truck became known as the Labubu truck, adults queued and sometimes fought for boxes at pop-ups, and the toy line grew big enough that Vong spun it into a separate business, KC Monsters, before the market saturated.
What you can take
A scarce, emotional product can be the traffic engine for an unrelated core business — but when the side-hustle outshines the brand, separate the two before the identity blurs.
Since then
By mid-2026 the Labubu market had saturated, and Vong was already planning to wind down KC Monsters after the summer (except possibly Christmas) to refocus on Dragon Wagon, including World Cup watch-party pop-ups. The ride had a rough side — price complaints, fights over boxes and conspiracy theories about the toys drew backlash — but the experiment showed how a small food truck could borrow a viral collectible to build community, foot traffic and a second brand, then pivot again before the trend cooled.
Sources
- Kansas City's Dragon Wagon started selling Labubus to 'feed the joy.' It quickly got crazy
- Out-of-the-box business: How Ling Vong's food truck got more than she bargained for with Labubus
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