🎯 The business: one truck or trailer, a menu of no more than six items, working a weekly rotation of lunch spots, breweries and events in one metro. It’s how you learn whether you belong in food — for a tenth of a restaurant build-out.

Food is the hardest category on this page. The federal survival numbers are blunt about it, and the reasons are physical: heat, hours, margins, and the fact that everyone thinks they can cook. What the truck changes is the cost of finding out. A failed restaurant is a quarter-million-dollar lesson; a failed truck is a used trailer you can resell. If food is the dream, this is the honest way to test the dream. (Cheaper still: your state’s cottage-food law or a market stall — see the permits chapter — before any wheels at all.)

Before any money moves: call the county health department and ask for their mobile-vendor packet. Every county is different, and buying a truck before reading yours is the classic five-figure mistake — some counties won’t permit certain rigs at all. Take the food-manager course (~$150, online) the same week.

The rig: used trailers run $15–30k and break less than used trucks; used trucks $25–60k; new anything can wait until you have a line out the window. Whatever you buy, a mechanic inspects it first, and your budget keeps $2,000 untouched for the repair that is coming. Ask any operator: the generator fails on the busiest Saturday of your first summer. Carry spares — pull cord, fuses, propane fittings.

The launch: a commissary agreement (the licensed kitchen the health code requires as your base, $400–800/month), inspection, fire-suppression cert, then a soft open at a brewery — breweries without kitchens actively want you and charge little or nothing. Build a fixed weekly rotation and publish it everywhere, every week, forever. Food-truck customers don’t follow food; they follow schedules.

LLC/EIN → food-manager certificate → health-department plan review before purchase → commissary agreement → fire suppression → city vending license and per-event permits → seller’s permit, because there’s sales tax on every taco. The county checklist is the master document; laminate it.

You’re not really hunting customers — you’re hunting locations, and locations bring their crowds. Email ten breweries; two will answer. Office parks book through their property managers, who want lunch options as an amenity — a polite email with your menu works startlingly often. Farmers markets, church festivals, the city’s truck park. And from your first week, catering inquiries will find you; weddings pay roughly double a street service for the same cooking.

A $12 plate carries about 30% food cost — $8.40 gross before labor, commissary, fuel, propane, and the card fees. A good lunch service moves 80 plates; many services move 40, and you will not know which kind a spot is until you’ve worked it twice. Five services a week at healthy volume grosses around $19k a month, out of which the truck pays everyone — including, eventually, you: a dialed-in solo operator nets $4–8k a month in season. Winter is real. Price the year, not the month.

Track plates-per-stop in your POS from day one; it’s the only opinion that counts. A spot that under-performs twice gets replaced without sentiment — wheels are the entire point of the format. If after a full season the numbers say the menu isn’t landing, change the menu before you change anything expensive; trucks pivot cuisines for the cost of a wrap panel and new signage.

Equipment, mostly, and always at the worst time — the reserve fund and the spare parts kit are the difference between a bad hour and a lost weekend. Health inspections go badly for exactly one reason: temperatures, so log them like a ritual. And the burnout is not hypothetical; this is the most physically brutal plan in this section. Two closed days a week isn’t laziness — it’s how you’re still cooking in year three.