A Food Truck Story Worth Passing Around the Table on Thanksgiving
What do you do for your Make-A-Wish when you’ve beaten cancer? If you’re 13-year-old Lucas Hobbs, you step inside a food truck and prepare a free meal for the Minneapolis police. Lucas and the O’Cheeze food truck (think grilled cheese sandwiches) pulled up outside of City Hall, last July, roughly seven months after Lucas went through treatment for Stage 3 Hodgkin lymphoma, according to the Star Tribune. Lucas is now in remission. “Sometimes it’s not that thankful of a job,” the boy said, referring to the job of a police officer. But Lucas hasn’t stopped with police officers. Prior to [...]
Should You Start a Food Truck in Retirement?
As more baby-boomers approach retirement, they begin to ask the question "What's next?" If you're thinking about to retirement and that starting a food truck would be a fun way to make some money, you're right. It can be a terrific way to supplement your income, get involved in serving your community, and build a business on your own terms. But make sure to do your research about the business model first! Consider this hypothetical exchange between a current food trucker and customer for some additional perspective on what building this type of work is involved in starting a food [...]
RAM Sprinter Style Van Food Truck with Low-Profile Hood
Recently there has been a trend towards smaller, even more mobile food trucks. These smaller sprinter-style vehicles can have a few advantages to the business owner: 1.) They are easier to navigate and can be parked in smaller spaces. 2.) If you need to drive frequently for either catering gigs or deliveries, the savings in fuel cost could be in the thousands of dollars per year. This recent build is one such example of a RAM Sprinter Style van food truck with a low-profile hood. As you can see in the video below, the concession window and shelf is built [...]
Reader Review: The Food Truck Handbook by David Weber
Probably THE definitive guide, if there ever was one, for an overall span of everything one needs to know in starting a Food Truck business, David Weber’s ‘The Food Truck Handbook’ seems to launch itself as the first go-to resource for every suggestion on the subject. ‘Start, Grow, and Succeed in the Mobile Food Business’ is the moniker given, and from what we can tell through reading through that’s exactly what it well help you do. The text is packed with 34 chapters on basically every subject one can think of regarding the startup, maintenance, running, and growth of a [...]
How to Make Money in the Winter with a Concession Business
As has become so popular to say nowadays, Winter is coming, and for Food Truck owners particularly this shall signal big changes to their work environment, and very important decisions that must be made. We’ve already discussed what needs to be done if choosing to keep your truck in storage to ride out and ignore the poorer winter business Here, but what if you wanted to stay open in the cold season? It’s a difficult road, and even in some of the best cases (and again, this is mainly considering that you’re in a area that actually has cold, snowy [...]
Seven Recipes You Won't Believe Were Made on a Food Truck
You gotta love food from a truck, there’s a reason that we have whole businesses based solely around building, following, helping, and even just plain talking about them! It’s not even about the simple pleasures; chefs far and wide have taken their modern, quality-focused techniques, fresh ingredients, and hardcore work ethics and applied it towards a small-housed operation for amazing prices. Thus was the movement started in cities like Miami and LA about a decade ago, transforming one’s thoughts of an industry filled with nameless white vans touting tacos, burritos, and simple sandwiches to one of creative and exciting intrigue. [...]
What is the Average Food Truck Owner's Yearly Salary?
The question of salary considerations for a food truck owner can easily be just as varied, finicky, and dependent as Concession Trailers, which we talked similarly about their many factors and end-of-day, or really year, profits here. Many an entrepreneur flocks to the food truck industry in hopes of making success, wanting to open up a food-service operation of their own while only able to gather enough money to go the mobile route instead of the heavily expensive restaurant business; or simply going off the low-overhead idea and equating it towards a higher chance at big salaries at the end of the year. [...]
How Much do Concession Trailers Make?
No matter how much we love what we do and what drives we have, all of us get into our fun and exciting mobile and concession food businesses for one shining reason above all others: to make money and make a living, hopefully by doing something that doesn’t feel like work. Being able to survive while doing this is key, and as such we need to have an idea how much we can make each year; can we survive on the actual profits of a concession trailer job? One definitely needs to double check all the factors and ensure their [...]
Food Truck Ovens: What to Look For in Yours
It mostly seems as if food trucks use just about the same kind of range equipment and ovens amongst each of them, but the almost unlimited number of options can make actually choosing the oven that’s right for your operation extremely difficult. We want to go for something that ‘works’ but won’t cost an exorbitant amount of money; though dangers do then abound when going for ‘cheaper’ options that might break down or not even heat properly after a month has passed, if that. And sadly there’s no real ‘one-fits-all’ option in the category; otherwise we wouldn’t be in the [...]
Food Trucks at the Airport? And Other Mobile News From August 2015
Summer is winding down and the busy period for many food truck owners, especially in the northern states are doing the same. Fortunately, there's still plenty of mobile food news to keep tabs on in the month of August, 2015. Enjoy this month's round up. Beaumont Truck Boom – yet another city’s food truck scene is developing fast with loads of new mobile businesses! Po Boy Truck Destroyed in Fire – Odessa native Rich Chick’s Cajun Kicks sadly lost in disaster, currently finding help from local vendors Minneapolis Brings Food Trucks to the Sky – local airport is discussing the [...]