🎯 The business: a kitchen on wheels that goes to breweries, office parks, festivals and private events. It is the restaurant apprenticeship that pays you instead of the other way around, at about a tenth of a restaurant’s buildout. The full game plan is in this section; this page is the short version.

Lunch crowds at office parks and hospitals, brewery and taproom regulars, festival-goers, and private event hosts who book the whole truck. Tickets run $12 to $18. A good lunch service is 100 to 200 covers; a festival day can be 400. Catering a wedding or corporate event at $25 to $40 a head is the best money the truck will make.

Before the truck: run the menu at a market stall for a season and keep the numbers. Then buy a trailer that has already passed a health inspection somewhere, with the plans. Line up a commissary and a brewery that wants a regular Thursday truck. Launch with six menu items, not sixteen. Book two private events before opening day; they cover the first month.

A 150-cover lunch at $14 is $2,100 of revenue with about 32 percent food cost, two paid staff, propane and a commissary fee. Five services a week is roughly $10,000 a week in season, and the first year’s profit after loan payments is often thin. The second truck, or the catering calendar, is where it becomes a business.

County health permit for a mobile food unit, fire suppression inspection for the hood, a commissary agreement, city vending permits (some cities cap trucks or ban them downtown), parking rules, a certified food manager, sales tax, and commercial auto insurance. The rules differ in every city you drive to.

The generator dies mid-service. A slow brewery night. Winter, in most of the country. Staff who do not show up on festival morning. And the unpredictable: a city rewriting its vending rules. The trucks that last have a catering book, a repair fund, and an owner who can cook the line alone when they must.