Why'd you get out of it Squish? Just too much work for the payoff?
Yah mon. That's exactly it. We operated in 3 fairly populated towns in NJ just outside Manhattan - Newark, Hoboken and Jersey City. The winters were just brutal. We should have offered delivery in the colder months. You literally suffer on that truck in winter. You'd think the fryer and grill running would heat the truck, but the hood exhaust would suck all that heat right out with it. So we'd turn off the hood for a few minutes until we killed enough brain cells with the carbon monoxide seeping into the truck, then turn the hood back on and froze to death. I was wearing 2 pairs of wool socks and multiple layers of clothing like an onion and still froze. In the summer we got heatstroke once. Spring and fall were ok. It was fun when the lines were long, it was a rush. People loving your food and waiting 20 minutes for it.
Even though we had a 5 star rating on Yelp with 25 reviews, not a lot but enough, people just don't come out in the cold. Even if they love you. 5 fucking stars. Maybe in Manhattan, with such a dense population, it would have been ok. Sheer numbers would have made it palatable cold or not.
Plus the restaurants in the towns we operated in started lobbying to the politicians to regulate us out of business with insane rules and regulations. And it worked. I went to some town hall meetings on the subject and it got heated. We had sit down fucking restaurants that served alcohol accusing us of being their greatest enemy. Really? You offer sit down waiter service with liquor and a truck serving falafel wrapped in foil is stealing your business? Maybe you should rethink your business model. But restaurants pay property taxes, so they won. In one town we worked in I don't think there are any more food trucks except one guy that's been doing it for well over 20 years that he got grandfathered in when the community intervened. In another town where we got to serve at the farmers market and a weekly live music event - food trucks are now banned there (we paid a fee for each event we served at). But at the end of the day, even with those venues, it just wasn't enough money. Spring and summer were ok - we often had lines over 10 deep. All in all the vast majority of residents and workers wanted the food trucks there, but the restaurants were too strong in that battle.
Logistics were tough. We had no brick and mortar location so we could not get deliveries. We had a kitchen space we rented but we weren't there long enough to get deliveries. We had to do all our shopping in person. Time is money. Meeting my pita delivery guy was a mission - we met at random parking lots like we were doing a fucking drug deal, where he was making other deliveries, and it often took an hour out of my day. But we had to have those pitas, they were simply the best product. And we served the best IMO. We were often compared to what is arguably considered one of the best falafel restaurants in NYC.
We made great money at food truck festivals though. Those were huge. I'm not sure how food trucks make it outside super populated cities. Maybe our business model was off. The numbers we calculated prior to opening just did not materialize. We did get it to where our food costs were about 1/3 of our final retail price, which is where they say you should be at, but perhaps that was not enough. We didn't have much food waste as we tweaked out our systems to adjust. I''m sure we made mistakes, but I don't find it to be a viable business model besides being seasonal and/or being in a very densely populated city.