The Risks of Running a Food Truck

Include running it into the ground

The odds of succeeding with a food truck are about one in a thousand.

So, you like the thought of beating the odds? Enough to want to open one? Cool. Go ahead. I thought it was a good idea, too. So did my wife at the time. We’re divorced now.

Just know this as truth once you’re in:

If someone says to you, strike while the iron is hot like right now, they actually mean — get cooking and expect long hours and lots of headaches. It’s all you’ll do as a food truck owner while running everything else, for the first year or two, until you stabilize. In most cases, this is what happens with food trucks that miraculously survive these times.

Unless you have an open invitation to set up shop at Tree House Brewing Company, investing in a food truck is as erroneous as banking on physical universities staying open. Let’s check the magic 8-ball on this one, for the truth —

Um, excuse me, Mr. Saturn who manages the 8-ball fortune-telling thingy, what do you see for the future of colleges and universities, and food trucks that don’t have a permanent residency at the most popular brewery in the world?

Outlook does not look good.

And excuse me for shaking you before. I realize now it is not necessary for you to respond.

As I see it, yes.

Oh, I get it. You’re only giving me one of the standard 20 responses that a magic 8-ball gives. I see it now. Very clever.

Without a doubt.

The food truck I owned was a horrible pain in the ass

I like food trucks. I like eating from them. I have only an aversion to owning them, dealing with them, storing them, stocking them, transporting them, cleaning them, declaring them, etc. I could go as far as to say I did not enjoy the electricity that needed to be stolen from the street in the middle of a Mexico City night to be able to run the appliances that I never should have bought to begin with. It was all a waste.

If you ever do this — think margins, and nothing else

I learned in Mexico City that things from America are sometimes considered cool. This gave me an advantage because I knew about pizza. Mexico City in 2012 had very bad pizza. It’s much better now. Before, it tasted like it came out of a microwave and was thrown in the oven for either too long or not enough and it never satisfied, even when drunk. But people ate it anyway, as there was nothing else to choose from.

I learned how to make pizza, damn it

I rendered the yeast mother, built up gluten, transferred it, reposed it, expanded it, built it up again, covered it, monitored temperature changes… I studied what I needed to do, down to the altitude in Mexico City, to make this pizza perfect, as CDMX is about 7,500 feet above sea level and it has an effect on baking (as well as preventing oxygen absorption). I really studied how to make perfect New Haven Style pizza. I conditioned the dough. Did it right. Made the sauce with salt and peeled tomatoes, I did it legit. With just the right amount of char.

This pizza was a hit in Mexico

And the good news was I was prepared to make and sell a lot of it. The thing about pizza is the margins are great. Just sell slices. Why make it complicated? Make big satisfying slices and sell them at an affordable price and make money over the long term. Even better to do this without having to rent a space. That means you’ll have to think outside the box and get creative folks, but you have food delivery services available to you, says the self-help guy that wants you to invest in his course on how to succeed with a food truck, and the only reason why this guy is promoting this course is that the course offers the best margins at $500 a pop. With little to no overhead. And it’s just some virtual version of him, dressed up and playing a few scenes out and editing them and sending them off to the course provider that makes it look like he is always live when he’s actually not there. He’s skiing in the alps because of this course. Not because of his food truck. It’s not so much because of a lack of money as there is no time to do anything else but sell food at high margins.

Look, who am I to want to interfere with anyone’s success? I don’t. But there are folks out there that are trying to say they are successful food truck owners when success has to do with other things. The thing that makes money has to do with selling courses. Or maybe that’s not it. I don’t know. The skiing in the alps could have something to do with cryptocurrency.

When I arrived in Mexico City, I realized I could do nothing until I acquired the Spanish language. It was then that I should have started writing.

I bought a food truck instead. And this touches on some part of my past that must have escaped my initial filters. It was hiding it in the back, not wanting it to be seen or recognized for the terrific failure it was. You see, I was trying to offer all the hardships of my past — LOVE LOVE LOVE — and this food truck was just one of those things that were too painful to approach, I suppose. So this is my way of handling it. Put it on Medium.

How do I show gratitude for hard-earned lessons?

It’s simple. I never repeat the mistake again. I never consider it. Knowing it shall lead to the worst possible scenarios. And you may notice how politically correct I am being here. I am quite proud of myself that I can say it was me who failed with this disaster of a food truck, however, I must also say there were variables at the time that was difficult to manage in tandem. Should I go into it? No. I imagine it’s just complaining. I hate complaining. Should I?

Well, the good news is, I learned Mexico City street talk

Yes, my food truck was situated in an area where there are folks who call themselves ‘viene viene’. Ask anyone who has lived in Mexico City for any time, and they know the ‘viene viene’. They are essentially valets that watch your car for pay. Identified by the red sash they keep with them, waving it around like cowboys. They run the streets. They speak hard. This viene viene I befriended swore so much it felt like every conversation was a spin-off of South Park the Movie, overdubbed in Spanish. They put plastic buckets filled with dried cement in the middle of parking spaces to mark their territory, and when you get out of your car and struggle to move it without verbally agreeing first to pay for the spot, they ask you what you are doing. If you leave your vehicle there, with the bucket pushed off to the side, your car will either have rims stolen or be keyed or damaged in some way by the time you return. At that point, the viene viene is nowhere to be found. He checks out for lunch, pays a ruffian to do the damage, and returns when the coast is clear. And while we were both working in the street, he taught me a lot of swear words.

This viene viene I befriended swore so much it felt like a spin-off of South Park the Movie, overdubbed in Spanish.

I should mention that I crashed the food truck and probably should have died

You can ask my ex-wife as a testament to this, I should be gone. Just got the decals done on this god-forsaken food truck, and it was ready to go. And it had everything, and it looked beautiful. It had actual live plants installed on it. I had fresh herbs growing on both sides with calendula, and this food truck looked great and it was a complete fucking waste of money. Because it turns out, if you are hauling one of these food trucks on a hitch, it acts a lot like a boat. And I didn’t remind myself of that quick enough when I saw a very large tree sticking out in the middle of the multi-lane road where I was transporting my newly declared food truck. So instead of turning toward the tree and then away, to properly avoid the crash, I simply turned away in a knee-jerk reaction, and that, of course, threw the food truck into the tree, and it proceeded to move erratically, and topple, and it should have flipped the truck I was driving at the same time.

Fortunately, the VW Pointer hauling the food truck was such a piece of shit that it saved my life

That’s right — the hitch on the back just fell off at the slightest twist, disconnecting itself from the food truck immediately. Two of my tires fell off, though. And that made driving difficult to manage.

My mother-in-law insisted that we try again

She offered to pay to have the food truck repaired. I just watched myself nearly die. My wife at the time was nearly 9-months pregnant with our first child. All the same, I bent the knee and went along with it.

One year later, the local delegation stole the food truck

That’s really all there is to it. My wife at the time got the footage of the theft and brought it to the delegation and explained that she is a news reporter, and will report this, and they simply told us that we weren’t allowed to sell food in the streets anymore. When we told them that EVERYONE was selling food in the streets, and none of them had food permits, and everyone was stealing electricity from local businesses, they just repeated that there are no permits in Mexico. What they were actually trying to tell us was to pay up, or get off the street.

We refused to pay. So the truck was taken off the street and never returned.

I learned so much from the process

I can talk about these stories forever. I have literally hundreds of them. All on any given day in Mexico. But for the sake of example, let’s time-travel to the start of COVID-19, and let’s say you bought a food truck, and you’ve put the blood, sweat, and tears into this, and now you’re thinking about expansion. As that would be more fun. Right? Not right.

More Responsibility = Less Fun

How could any restaurant hope to stay open when they are told they must be at 30% capacity? Why would anyone ever put themselves in that situation again? I wouldn’t. It’s not worth the risk.

Dare I say: put it all into crypto

Had I invested all the money from the food truck into Bitcoin at this time in 2012, I would be a multi-millionaire today. Maybe a billionaire.

I’d also probably think I was still in a healthy, reciprocal marriage, so I’m happy I went through what I did, for the sake of life lessons.

Which is to say: you can always invest in crypto. It’s got a 1T market cap. That means it’s not going anywhere but up.