business and defines a general set of expectations the public will have when they walk up to your service window. You have a lot of decisions to make when formulating your food truck concept, and ultimately, you’re limited only by your imagination and budget. With so many possibilities, how do you know what kind of food truck to run?
In this chapter, I go over the items you must decide on as you generate a concept for your food truck. I walk you through the various types of vehicles you can use for your business and explain how to get the vehicle you need. I touch on the important steps in giving your truck a name that people will remember. Last but not least, I present another option for starting a food truck (in addition to starting a business from scratch): joining a franchise.
Generating Your Food Truck’s Concept
Figuring out the concept for your food truck is one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make for your business. After you’ve made this decision, everything else about your business will fall in line with it, from its specific menu items and truck design to the number of employees you’ll hire and their culinary backgrounds.
In the following sections, I list food choices and general considerations to help you come up with a basic concept; then I help you narrow your idea based on your potential customers and the atmosphere you want.
Note: In some cases, you may not need to determine a concept for your food truck. For example, you may be a food truck franchisee of a restaurant that has already worked out all the details of your concept. See the later section “Another Possibility: Joining a Franchise” for details.
At its most basic level, your truck will be most recognized for the food you serve. In the following sections, I note several categories of food that have found food truck success around the United States.
Savory foods
You have a wide variety of options when it comes to serving savory foods in your food truck:
❯❯ American cuisine is capable of making it onto any list of popular food trucks thanks to Americans’ love of hamburgers. Other popular American favorites are grilled cheese sandwiches, hot dogs, French fries, mac ’n’ cheese, and various types of barbecued meat.
❯❯ Mexican cuisine is known for its varied flavors, colorful decoration, and variety of spices and ingredients, many of which are native to the country. Tacos, burritos, tamales, and tortas are menu favorites of many food truck owners because they’re easily massaged to fit into various concepts.
❯❯ African cuisine (for example, Ethiopian, Moroccan, or South African) traditionally uses a combination of locally available fruits, cereal grains, and vegetables, as well as milk and meat products.
❯❯ Italian cuisine is hard to explain without mentioning pizza and pasta, but these two dishes tell you almost all you need to know about this style of cuisine. Some truck owners vending Italian cuisine regularly serve these dishes along with veal and eggplant parmesan sandwiches.
❯❯ Asian cuisine (such as Chinese and Japanese) typically consists of rice or noodles, with a soup. Foods are made from fish, meat, vegetable, tofu, and the like. Food items are typically flavored with dashi, miso, and soy sauce and are generally low in fat and high in salt.
❯❯ Mediterranean cuisine is full of fresh vegetables and high in flavor. Options for food trucks choosing Mediterranean cuisine include (but aren’t limited to) kabobs, gyros, pita sandwiches (vegetable, shawarma, falafel, and lamb), hummus, and baba ghanoush.
❯❯ Thai cuisine is often confused with Chinese cuisine. The primary difference is in its flavoring. Thai food has a balanced mix of sweet, sour, and spice. Bánh mi is by far the most popular of the foods coming from Thai-themed trucks, such as the Bon Me Truck out of Boston.
❯❯ Indian cuisine may provide the widest variety of food for your menu even though it’s most known for vegetarian fare. The real treats of Indian cuisine are chicken and fish tikkas, naan, and samosas.
Other styles of cuisine to investigate include Caribbean, Cajun, Cuban, German, Philippine, Native American, Spanish, soul food, seafood, Tex-Mex, vegetarian/vegan, and Vietnamese.
Just desserts
While some of the savory trucks provide minimal coverage of various dessert favorites, other food truck owners focus their attention on these sweet delights – everything from ice cream, waffles, cupcakes, shaved ice, whoopie pies, and brownies. You can even find trucks that provide more ethnic styles of dessert on their menus, such as cannoli, tiramisu, crêpes, and baklava.
Tasty beverages
Although food trucks serving alcoholic beverages haven’t been approved en masse, nonalcoholic beverage trucks have. Consumers are constantly attempting to improve their health, and food truck owners have latched onto this phenomenon by providing these customers with a mobile option. Trucks that sell nothing but juice or smoothies have made their way onto the streets of some cities with much success.
After you know the food choices available to you (see the preceding section), consider these items when you begin the process of selecting a food concept for your truck:
❯❯ Having a unique concept: Make sure your idea is different from the ideas behind both food trucks and similar casual brick-and-mortar restaurants in your locality. If ten Mexican cuisine trucks or restaurants already exist in the area, you may want to avoid opening another one. (See Chapter 3 for details on determining what’s already in your local food truck market.) However, if you decide to open a truck with a popular concept anyway, make sure you offer something that differentiates you from the others, such as fusing the basic taco with another ethnic cuisine.
❯❯ Making sure your concept is easy to understand: Although differentiating yourself from your competitors is important, you must make sure your idea isn’t so different that people don’t get it. This type of consumer confusion can lead to your downfall because
