7 Menu Card Design Hacks for Food Truck Owners
No matter the style of food establishment you are running, you really need to understand at least a little about marketing and psychology in order to better promote your brand. And this goes double for food trucks, which often have more passing trade than standalone restaurants and cafes. Being on the street gives food trucks an advantage, but if you want to take more advantage of your passing customers, and entice them to come back again for more great food, then having a menu card they can take with them is the best option. Menu cards should be given to [...]
7-Step Guide to Creating a Memorable Food Truck Slogan
In this post-millennial era, the food truck industry is still booming. Becoming more popular on an almost daily basis, new food trucks are popping up all over the United States, bringing delicious delicacies to the curbside and outside malls and office blocks. An industry that is estimated to be worth more than $2.7 billion a year, a food truck is a lucrative business idea with heaps of potential. Now that you have your food truck name - based on our awesome articles on how to start and how to name your food truck business - it’s time to start thinking [...]
What to Consider When Choosing a Wholesale Supplier
When many of us first start new food truck businesses, we don’t know where to buy the inventory we need to make the signature dishes that are going to keep our hungry customers coming back for more. The solution, at first, is simple: When you need food, you go to the supermarket. It’s actually not a bad way to get started. After all, when you first open your truck, you have no idea what kind of volume you’re going to do every day, you probably have limited capital to buy product in large quantities, and you have, in most cases, [...]
10-Step Action Plan to Wildly Increase Your Holiday Food Sales
Labor Day and then Halloween is right around the corner. You know what else is? The craziest 6-8 weeks of your life known as the holiday season. It's the time of year the cash rolls in and every customer you meet is unbelievably happy (ok, most of them). While you probably have thousands of things to do (I know I do!), I'd highly recommend putting some time into making sure you're going to run an automated sales generating machine this holiday season. Over the past few weeks, I've been neck-deep in holiday cheer. And I wanted to share 10 tactics [...]
35 Remarkable Food Truck Industry Statistics (Updated 2020)
Most people recognize that the food truck craze started just right after the economic recession in 2008, but did you know it started way back almost one and a half centuries ago? The idea was conceptualized by Walter Scott in 1872 when he sold pies, sandwiches, and coffee through a "lunch wagon" near a local newspaper office in Providence, Rhode Island. Fast forward to the 21st century, this basic concept has since evolved into a more dynamic way of offering grub to foodies. Today, the food truck concept brings restaurant-style food closer to consumers. Whether through catering events or while [...]
Learn How to Demo Food like a Pros: Ultimate Guide
Before people taste your food, they see it with their eyes. They smell it. Here's some tips you can use to improve the appearance of your food to encourage more people to give your truck, trailer, or food stall a shot. Retailers are more likely to carry your product if they know they can move it quickly off the shelves. Shelf space is always at a premium and no retailer wants to carry a line that will simply sit and sit and sit. When you’re selling-in to a retailer or vending at an event, you need to build confidence that: [...]
What I Learned from Two Food Pricing Experiments
Pricing is one of the most challenging parts of running a food business. The right price on the shelf (and in turn, to stores, distributors, and brokers) determines your success. You could sell very little of a premium product and a ton of a low-priced product. The challenge? You need to know where you fall. And the strategy that's going to get you there. It took me six months to decide I wanted to test my prices. One of my mentors kept nudging me. "Test your prices! What's the worst that could happen?" he'd ask me every month. I wouldn't do [...]
Can You Install Air Conditioning in a Food Truck Kitchen?
Can you install an air conditioner into the kitchen of a food truck? This is a frequently asked question we receive from prospective clients contacting our manufacturing center. The short answer is yes! You can get an air conditioner installed into a mobile kitchen. In fact, this is an extremely common feature in our builds. But here's the problem with air conditioning in a mobile kitchen. Air conditioning unit works great for prep work and cleanup. But once you turn on the cooking equipment and exhaust hood most of the cool air will get sucked out of unit. These are [...]
8 Tips to Improve Your Food Truck Catering Pitch
As the country moves toward reopening the economy, summer events are expected to gradually pickup. Even though we are likely months away from returning to normal, now is actually the perfect time to work on improving your business. One opportunity is to improve your pitch for lucrative catering clients. Most years the start of summer means a busy food truck schedule. That means produce lots of outdoor festivals and celebrations. If your schedule is anything like mine most years, it's jam-packed (pun intended) with events, shows, store demos - you name it, I'm doing it. Now is a great time [...]
The 7 Food Business Reports You Need to Run at the End of Every Year
December is a crazy month. You've got holiday parties to attend and maybe even cater to (which for many of you represent a large chunk of your annual sales). And of course you have year-end accounting (unless you've hired a bookkeeper). Oh, and did I mention, holiday parties, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanza, and New Years? It's a lot to handle. But you can't lose steam. Finish strong. Hit your sales targets and sell your heart out. It's a busy time of year, but I know you can do it. And if you get stuck I'm here to help. That's why I'm [...]