In Minnesota, You Can Get Food Delivery By Jet Ski

I have never been lucky enough to have a boat or have a friend who will take me out in their boat, but I imagine that if I were spending an afternoon lounging on a boat in the middle of a lake, I would get hungry after a while. Responsible people would probably pack food ahead of time, but when I get hungry, especially on lazy afternoons, I start thinking about all the food I don't have. Usually pizza, but sometimes fried chicken. Or nachos. So it must be truly terrible to be stuck in a boat in the middle of a lake with a craving for junk food and to know that you can't have that pizza unless you go back to shore, which would spoil the whole point of lazing on a boat.

Dylan Dierking, a Twin Cities college student, thought the whole problem through and came up with a solution: he would deliver food to boaters by jet ski. His mother suggested he name the company Foodski, and so he did.

Originally Dierking considered using a drone or a dinghy, but he decided a jet ski would be more fun. As he told KARE-11 TV in Minneapolis, "Who doesn't want to drive a jet ski around for a living?" (The question is clearly rhetorical.) He packs the food in an insulated backpack and uses his legs as shock absorbers, as KARE-11 put it, "to keep sandwiches and pizzas from turning into smoothies." He charges a delivery fee of 25% of the food bill, with a minimum order of $10. He says that 90% of his customers have taken video of him as he approaches with their food.

Although Minnesota has 10,000 lakes (it actually has 11,842, if you want to get technical), Dierking has so far concentrated his business on just one, White Bear Lake in St. Paul. He chose it because he grew up across the street (his parents still live there) and has the outline tattooed on his arm. Foodski still appears to be a one-man operation, and it works with just four restaurants around White Bear Lake.

But Dierking has an entrepreneurial spirit—Foodski is actually his second business, following a clothing line he started three years ago when he was 19—and he's already planning to expand to the much larger Lake Minnetonka and St. Croix River. "Doing what makes you happy and what's fulfilling I think is super important to leading a true full life," he told KARE-11. Now if only we could all be so fulfilled by having boats.