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Published:
October 17, 2016

Running a Food Truck For Dummies

Overview

Drive your food truck business to success

While food trucks may not be the new kid on the block anymore, it's a segment that continues to swell—and there's still plenty of room for growth. If you have your sights set on taking your culinary prowess on the road, Running a Food Truck For Dummies, 2nd Edition helps you find your food niche, follow important rules of conducting business, outfit your moving kitchen, meet safety and sanitation requirements, and so much more.

Gone are the days of food trucks offering unappealing prepackaged meals, snacks, and coffee. In today's flourishing food service industry, they're more like restaurants on wheels, offering eager curbside patrons everything from gourmet tacos and Korean BBQ to gluten-free pastries and healthy vegan fare. Whether you're the owner or operator of an existing food truck business looking to up the ante or a chef, foodie, or gourmand interested in starting your own mobile restaurant endeavor, Running a Food Truck For Dummies has you covered.

  • Create a food truck business plan to set yourself up for success
  • Stay profitable by avoiding the most common operating mistakes
  • Harness public relations and social media to build your following
  • Grow from one truck to multiple trucks, restaurants, or a food truck franchise

Packed with the latest information on legislation and ordinances, securing loans, and marketing to the all-important Millennials, this one-stop guide helps you cook up a well-done food truck venture in no time!

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About The Author

Richard Myrick is editor-in- chief and founder of Mobile Cuisine Magazine (mobile-cusine.com), a central source for mobile street food information. Since its inception, Mobile Cuisine has been teaching aspiring culinary professionals how to create successful food truck businesses by providing valuable information that can help anyone build a food truck business.

Sample Chapters

running a food truck for dummies

CHEAT SHEET

Running a successful food truck is tougher than it may appear. You must plan and prepare everything that a fine dining establishment does (except the china and linen napkins), such as concept development, menu planning, and hiring and keeping a great staff, but then you have to take your kitchen on the road and provide your customers with out-of-this-world food and service.

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If you haven’t created a food truck Instagram account yet, you may want to consider heading out to do that. An Instagram presence could just be the ticket to garnering new business for your food truck.All you will need is a username that ties into your food truck brand (hopefully it matches your Facebook and Twitter user names), and a few photos to get started.
Your food truck is a business, so you need to get the necessary forms filled out and filed before you hit the streets and open your service window. Use the following list to ensure that you have the accounts and paperwork you need before your food truck’s opening day: Business checking accounts Business l
It is a good idea to prepare your food truck staff for emergencies. Do your employees know what to do in case of an emergency? What if there’s an explosion, a fire, or another type of emergency in or around your truck? Your employees need to understand what their roles are in the event of an emergency. Whether an accident happens to a co-worker or one of your truck’s customers, your staff needs to know how to respond.
Email marketing is great from a customer retention standpoint, not only because it enables you to include promotional information for your food truck, but also because it helps you develop a more intimate relationship with your customers. Email is personal. When a customer gives you access to his inbox, it’s a sign that the customer trusts you and your brand and wants to further the relationshipYou can use your email list to update customers on what you’re up to, share personal business stories, and include information about promotions and special events you plan to attend or host to bring people back to your service window.
Salaries, food costs, food truck costs, business taxes, commercial kitchen and office rent, equipment leases, phone bills, postage — the expenses associated with running a food truck may seem to never end. However, your ability to get a firm grasp on these cash outflows can play an important role in your business’s success or failure.
In your mobile food business, sales are what determine whether you’re able to make it through your first year of operation. Forecasting your future sales is a critical step in ensuring that your food truck is profitable. Prospective investors want to know whether your projected sales will support your business needs.
A very important aspect of starting and operating a food truck is quality customer service, because, without it, your business won’t survive. One aspect of customer service that many food truck owners overlook is providing their customers with an easy refund or return policy. So be sure to keep customer service in mind while writing this policy.
Every food truck owner has his own challenges; this aspect is just part of life in the business world. If you don’t have a strong culinary background and need assistance in putting your menu together, hiring a local chef or a consultant with the expertise, answers, and solutions you need may be a great option.
After determining what types of positions you need to fill for your food truck business, the biggest problem you’ll face is finding good candidates to hire. The first thing you should do is determine how you define a great candidate. If you skip this step, you won’t be able to explain what you want in job descriptions and postings, and you won’t know what to look for when you’re sifting through resumés.
After you have a good selection of candidates for your food truck business, it’s time to begin the interview process. Don’t hire an applicant without first scheduling an interview, no matter how promising his resumé is. The interview process is important, because it gives you the opportunity to thoroughly examine all the job applicants who want to work for you.
Paying with your smartphone is all the rage and you can use this to your advantage for your food truck business. Near Field Communication (NFC) payments are very popular in mobile payment option that you as a vendor should consider. NFC allows consumers to swipe their mobile device in order to make a payment. Apple Pay and Android Pay make use of this technology, and it seems to be secure so far.
Unlike restaurants, food trucks are often operated by a small staff composed of individuals working a variety of roles. The size of your truck will help you determine the number of staff members that can efficiently and comfortably work inside of it.In some cases, food truck owners have two or three sets of employees: those who work on the truck and others who work at the commercial kitchen or in the office.
After you’ve selected and hired the best candidates for your food truck staff, you need to put together a couple of government forms as well as some internal documents for the new hires to complete. You’ll also want to give them a personal copy of your employee handbook, which includes all your policies and procedures, and you may want to have them sign a document that confirms they received, read, understood, and agree with all the attached policies.
Running a successful food truck is tougher than it may appear. You must plan and prepare everything that a fine dining establishment does (except the china and linen napkins), such as concept development, menu planning, and hiring and keeping a great staff, but then you have to take your kitchen on the road and provide your customers with out-of-this-world food and service.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a technical term for techniques used to make it easier for search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing to find your food truck’s website. These search engines are the primary means by which many of your potential customers will find out about your food truck.By increasing your search engine ranking, you raise your site’s popularity and influence.
Expectations are the nonverbal agreements you establish with your food truck customers about the food and service you and your staff provide them. These may be things such as the quantity or quality of your food, but they may also include the timing involved in getting an order completed or even the plating and appearance of their meal as you serve it.
Food truck owners have discovered that using social media sites, like Twitter and Facebook, to spread the word to their customers is an inexpensive and effective way to advertise and to keep people interested and informed about their business. To maximize the usefulness of social media for your food truck, keep the following tips in mind: Fill in your bio so people searching for food trucks in your area can find you.
Most municipalities require your food truck to carry a first-aid kit on board to help those who may be injured at your food truck. Basic first-aid kits typically carry the following supplies: Adhesive bandages Antibiotic ointment Antiseptic wipes Burn gel Eyewash First-aid tape Gauze Nonstick pads Sterile eye patches Some first-aid kits may also carry over-the-counter medications, such as pain relievers and antihistamines.
One of your regular expenses as a food truck owner derives from the fact that your kitchen has wheels, and you must bring your food to your customers. Your food truck needs fuel to complete this task. Most food truck operators spend between $250 and $500 a month to fuel up their trucks. With fuel prices in flux throughout the year, determining how much to set aside can be difficult, but unless your truck has a permanent location right next to your commercial kitchen, it’s a sum that must be accounted for.
One of the best ways to promote your mobile business is to issue press releases to your local media. You can distribute most of your press releases by email or through online distribution services, such as PRweb or PR Newswire, to editors at newspapers, magazines, radio stations, and television stations. Using distribution services may lead to your news getting syndicated by all your local or regional media outlets.
People are human. Mistakes happen. No matter how skilled or well-intentioned they are, your food truck staff is bound to slip up from time to time and violate policies in your employee handbook. In those instances, you need to consider taking disciplinary measures.Feeling uncomfortable with disciplinary situations is normal, and most people aren’t trained to deal with unacceptable employee behavior.
Of course, you need to train staff members when they first join your food truck team, however, ongoing training for all staff is also essential, not only because everyone on the staff can stand to learn more, but also because creating a culture of steady learning helps you improve retention rates and make your employees more effective at what they do.
Too many food truck owners center all their attention on their food instead of their entire business. Your food is important, of course, but your truck is the platform for getting your food to your customers. If it isn’t properly maintained, you may find yourself in a situation where you waste money not only by throwing away the food you’ve already prepared for the day but also by sinking in a lot of money to get your truck back on the road.
It’s a good idea to verify the eligibility of any employee you hire for your food truck business. Any employer in the United States found guilty of hiring employees who are not authorized to work in the country may be subject to civil fines or criminal penalties.What could this mean for you? Penalties start at $3,200 per worker for a first offence up to a maximum of $16,000 per worker for a third offence.
Keeping tabs on your competition is a great strategy for your growing food truck business. By continually monitoring your competitors, you get to know their good and bad behaviors and anticipate what they may be likely to do next, which helps your business gain a competitive advantage over them. Using this data, you can plan a business strategy that helps you keep your current customers and win (not steal) customers away from competitors.
Determining what platform, or vehicle — food truck, trailer, or cart — to use to present your menu to your customers requires that you consider the following factors: What equipment will your menu require? If your menu requires that you need a flat-top grill, fryers, and other assorted kitchen equipment, you may want to use a food truck or full-sized trailer.
Start compiling your food truck handbook with a basic outline, and jot down some notes. The following list contains some of the standard items included in many employee handbooks: Welcome letter History of the company Organizational chart of the company Statement of Equal Opportunity Employment Proof of right to work (I-9 form) Training Termination, suspension, and discipline Attendance policy Work schedules Breaks and lunches Payday procedures Overtime Vacations Holidays Sick leave Jury duty Family leave Injury or accidents Driver authorization Smoking Drug and alcohol policy Firearms or weapons Theft Tardiness Sexual or other harassment Insurance Uniforms and grooming standards Make sure you’re complying with both state and federal laws.
Depending on your daily driving routes, your food truck will be seen by thousands of people every day. So what should you include on its exterior? You can include your logo and images that display your food items in a colorful and appetizing light. Also include anything that you feel your customers need to know about how to find or follow you at a later date, such as your website URL, phone number, or the ways they can follow you on Facebook or Twitter.
Creating effective job descriptions to entice staff for your food truck isn’t rocket science, but unless you have experience writing them, it can certainly seem like it. To develop an ad that attracts the best candidates, you need to provide enough information to draw their interest. Including the following items in your job ad can help you do just that.
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Frequently Asked Questions

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