Running a food truck could be just as challenging as driving in a Formula One race. There is an inherent need for speed to achieve victory; and for food trucks, their operational speed is the key determining factor. Unlike their brick-and-mortar brethren, food trucks have limited space. Thus, food truck owners are constantly seeking out ways to increase sales in food trucks and improve their efficiency. So, how do you grease the wheels to secure profitable deals? We’re here to answer that.
Predicted to grow at an annual rate of 8.4%, food trucks are making a splash in the market. Due to their simplicity and lower startup costs, food trucks have emerged as a popular business model for many aspiring restaurateurs. Despite higher mobility and lower operational costs, managing food trucks can be quite a Herculean task. To answer the age-old question of “how to increase sales in food trucks?”, we must first focus on improving the overall efficiency of the food truck.
How to improve food truck business?
Just like an F1 car has checkpoints on the race track to monitor its direction, here are 5 key focus areas in order to increase sales in food trucks and enhance your food truck marketing ideas:
Space management
Due to their crisp shape, food trucks must be carefully managed, in order to maximize convenience for your staff and deliver a sweet customer experience. Here are a few essential considerations to optimize your food truck space:
- Design a functional layout for your food truck marking the essential areas. These comprise of your kitchen, your service area, and your storage. Ensure you provide enough room for your employees to move about freely, as they will be handling utensils at fiery temperatures.
- Make sure your food truck has a good HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) system in place. Proper ventilation and air-conditioning are essential for creating a safe working environment. Install good drainage and waste disposal systems in your food truck.
- Include enough room for preparation and packaging while designing your kitchen and workstations. Consider giving your staff ample room to operate effectively in both regions without productivity loss.
Inventory Management
Effective inventory management, regardless of the size or type of the restaurant, is inevitably crucial for its success. It also helps in achieving lower expenses and an increase in food truck sales. To make your inventory management as smooth as butter, here are a few tips:
- Create an inventory management checklist to assist you in planning your purchases, keeping track of your inventory, tracking your consumption, and helping you to reduce wastage.
- Categorize your ingredients and semi-finished recipes according to your menu, and label each item before storing them. This will ensure you reduce the turnaround time to serve your customers, as well as prevent shelving errors.
- Regularly check your stock levels to decide when and how much to purchase. Buying the right quantity of ingredients ensures you are always stocked up and helps you avoid ingredient wastage due to expiration loss.
Order Management
Undoubtedly, faster order processing profoundly impacts a food truck’s efficiency. You must remember: an order delayed, a customer dismayed. If you process orders quickly, you curtail the turnaround time, and your customers enjoy reduced wait times and a wonderful experience. Here are some “cherry-on-top-of-sundae” ideas to ramp up your order processing abilities:
- Implement a simple and user-friendly billing system. You can expedite your food truck’s order processing capabilities by producing bills with just a few taps.
- Enable digital payments for your food truck. By utilizing multiple payment methods, you will be able to serve various customers and expedite payment processing.
- Install a good point-of-sale system and enable integration with third-party aggregators such as Zomato or Swiggy. This will help you improve your food truck marketing by positioning it in multiple locations, as well as in monitoring the orders flowing through these online food ordering apps.
- Automate your kitchen order ticket (KOT) taking software. By implementing multiple printers, or by adopting a kitchen display system (KDS), you will be able to keep track of every single order and prevent man-made errors such as noting down a wrong order item or getting orders mixed-up.
Menu Management
Discovering the right niche and cuisine for your food truck goes a long way to increasing your business revenue. Once you have identified your niche, whether it’s cheesy pizzas, sizzling shawarmas, or mouth-watering milkshakes, you can then focus on crafting your menu. This will also aid in creating the right marketing strategy for food truck businesses. For designing a zesty menu, here are a few tips:
- Determine your food truck’s ideal processing capacity. This relies on a variety of factors, including your storage capacity, the time required to prepare meals, and the skill level of your kitchen staff.
- Make your menu concise. Don’t overload your customers with too many options. For instance, if milkshakes were your specialty, your menu could include the following five flavors: vanilla, butterscotch, chocolate, strawberry, and a seasonal product. Choosing a seasonal product also helps in effective inventory management.
- Create juicy combos for your customers. Identify the dishes that are ordered more frequently, and find ways to sell them together. You can upsell or cross-sell your best-sellers through this type of food truck marketing, resulting in more sales.
Analytics & Reporting
The final checkpoint that you must cross, in order to achieve enhanced efficiency, is to rely on restaurant reports and analytics to understand your food truck’s performance. While reading these reports, do keep the following suggestions in mind:
- Regularly review your sales reports. These will assist in determining which menu items are doing well and in predicting your sales for a specific period.
- Keep an eye on your inventory usage. Knowing this will help you proportion your ingredients carefully and cut back and minimize purchase and wastage costs.
- Get to know your customers. In order to discover what a specific consumer likes to order, you can study customer-specific sales figures. Based on this information, you can design loyalty programs and discounts.
Zoom across with Gofrugal’s Food Truck POS
Now that you’ve understood the essential checkpoints towards achieving enhanced efficiency, all that’s left for you to do is to acquire the right fuel, i.e., a cutting-edge food truck management system. Gofrugal’s Food Truck POS system helps you manage daily operations seamlessly through its beneficial features:
- Available on tab and iPad devices, eliminating the need for bulk machinery for automating your food truck
- Comprehensive sales reports that help you to identify your best-selling items and sales quantity generated on an hourly, daily, or monthly basis
- Simple menu management that makes designing and managing multiple menus based on seasonality and customer preferences a piece of cake
- Smart inventory management system that helps you curtail your wastage costs and make timely purchases
- Intuitive kitchen display systems (KDS) to help your process orders faster and prevent errors in meal preparation
- More than 140 reports to help you understand your business performance and plan your daily production
- Multiple payment gateways and third-party integrations to help you grow your business across multiple locations
Adopt Gofrugal’s Food Truck POS system today, and breeze through like greased lightning towards achieving optimal efficiency for your food truck.
