NEW YORK - Advertising Age highlighted the nation??s food truck craze earlier this week, crediting it for popularizing ethnic foods and lesser-known cuisines among U.S. consumers.

"[Food trucks have] allowed those flavors to more easily surface and spread through cities and allow more people to try them," said Kazia Jankowski, associate culinary director at Sterling Rice Group, an agency that tracks restaurant and culinary trends. "They've allowed for those flavors to enter the mainstream via a different way and we're seeing those kinds of flavors make their way into more brick-and-mortar establishments."

Jankowski pointed to Chipotle as an example, which is testing Shop House and Spanish chain 100 Montaditos as a larger player leading the way with "global street food."

"Food trucks have changed the conversation about the way international casual food has been able to become part of our regular dining experience," she said.

Food industry expert Phil Lempert said food trucks are important to millennials, a demographic willing to experiment with new tastes. In the Technomic 2011 Food Trucks Innovation report, 42% of consumers surveyed ages 18 to 30 and 38% of those 31 to 40 said they visit food trucks at least once a week.

While international food is still largely untapped by chain restaurants (Jack in the Box notwithstanding), food truck operators are looking to expand into brick-and-mortar restaurants and supermarkets.

Kevin Morrison founded a food truck in Denver called Pinche Tacos in 2010, which sells "Mexican street food," according to Morrison. Five months after it launched, he opened a Pinche Tacos restaurant.

"It was a very inexpensive way of getting into the business to kind of test out the market to see what kind of feedback I got before I went brick-and-mortar," Morrison said.

Lempert said a brick-and-mortar restaurant is far more expensive than a food truck and instead recommended pursuing grocery stores for expansion.

"Why open up a place and scrape by vs. doing something bigger?" he asked, before crediting the movement for its marketing savvy.

"If you take a look at what [food-truck operators] been able to do with Twitter and Facebook from a marketing standpoint -- having people follow them around and everything else -- it's brilliant," he said.

For more on food trucks, see "On the Move" in NACS Magazine.