Chapter

3

The Right Concept and Food

In This Chapter

In the food truck business there’s no such thing as the “right” concept and food, there’s just the right concept and food for you. Our mantra for defining what’s right for your truck is Do You—in other words, stay true to who you are. Over the years I’ve spoken with many ultra-successful people, and that’s the one concept that connects all of their stories. In Chapter 3, I help you decide how to select the best menu for your food truck concept.

Staying True to Who You Are

Successful people stay true to who they are, their roots, and their values. They choose a path and product they believe in with every inch of their humanity. To be successful, you need to follow their lead. If you try to create a truck that’s not representative of you and your skills, the customer will know, and I can guarantee you that it won’t lead to success.

Here are a few examples of food truck entrepreneurs who stayed true to themselves and succeeded:

Can you see that all these trucks somehow make sense? The proprietors’ beliefs, passions, and personalities are inseparable from their products. If they’re hip, their truck is hip; if they love dumplings, they sell dumplings.

This isn’t rocket science. It’s actually the exact opposite; it’s the science of simplicity.

Picking Your Niche

Great food truck brands have a clearly defined niche. Successful food trucks, and that’s the only kind we care about, do one thing and do it really well. Whatever the item you’ve chosen to sell, your brand should be centered on showcasing and promoting it. The simpler the idea the better; not only does this keep your operational costs down, it enables you to focus your marketing and branding message.

To start, let’s break down trucks into the following categories:

You can achieve success with any of these types of trucks as long as you execute them correctly. Whatever type you choose, you have to know that you can be the best in your world. That means looking at your target area and making sure you’re able to make the best version of that item. There’s no point in setting out to be the second-best taco truck in downtown Cleveland. Nobody wants to eat at the second-best taco truck; they want the best. Studies prove that the returns for first of anything are exponentially higher than those for second. Just take a look at this weekend’s movie box office returns. Most of the time, the movie that comes in first makes two or three times what the second place one does.

Now that you know the importance of determining your niche, how are you going to figure it out? Try not to complicate that idea. Instead, focus on the simplest aspects of your idea as you develop it.

Tip

Whenever you’re making a decision about your truck and you don’t know what to do, sit down, take a deep breath, and try to keep it as simple as possible. Then choose the simplest solution and go with it. Overcomplicating your truck will lead to failure.

For example, if you grew up in an Italian family and love cooking Italian food, particularly meatballs (everyone in your family raves about them), one option is to consider opening an Italian food truck. You could sell chicken parmigiana, pizza, meatballs, spaghetti, salad, garlic rolls, tiramisu, and so on. But keep in mind that your specialty is meatballs, not the best chicken parmigiana, pizza, and tiramisu. So why complicate your life by making all that other stuff?

Your diamond is your meatball, and you should focus solely on it. In other words, you should focus on creating a meatball truck, not an Italian food truck. By simplifying your concept, your food and labor costs will be lower, your marketing message and target market will be more defined, and you can focus on being the “best in the world” at meatballs.

But what if there’s an Italian restaurant that’s famous for its meatballs where you’re planning to park your truck? Can you be better than them? And even if you can, is it worth the time and energy making it known that you are?

Because you have a truck, you can put your key in the ignition and find a place to park where there’s less competition. So you hit the streets, do some research, and you know what? There’s a better location—a parking lot between three office buildings, with one shopping center within walking distance and no Italian restaurants nearby. Now you have the best product in a location with a need. You have further defined your niche.

The point isn’t defining a niche, it’s defining your niche. You don’t have to be the best in the entire world; you just have to be the best in your world.

You’ve now determined your product niche, but you’re only halfway done nailing down your concept.

Determining Your Cultural Perspective

Back in the day it would have been okay to define your niche and go to work, but food trucks are a microcosm of modern business. They showcase many aspects of the future of the business world, including social media, mobility, and micro markets. This brings us to layer two in defining your concept: determining your cultural perspective.

In today’s hypercompetitive business landscape, having a good product is definitely the most important factor, but how you communicate about that product, and how the product itself looks and feels, is becoming almost as significant.

Truck Tales

The Mud Truck, a coffee truck in Manhattan with multiple locations, sells coffee, but they’re also selling a lifestyle. They’re the anti-establishment coffee retailer, which is perfect, considering their target market in downtown Manhattan. They even speak the language of their customers, referring to the ambiance around their truck: “The smokers smoked, the dogs had bones, and it played sweet soul music,” according to their website. Since its inception, the Mud Truck has spun off into bricks-and-mortar locations, apparel, and wholesale coffee.

Think of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream; do they just sell ice cream? Nope. Ben & Jerry’s sells a cultural perspective; they’re socially responsible, and that comes directly from the associated personalities of Ben and Jerry. When a truck speaks on Twitter or is written about on food blogs, it needs to have a point of view and a voice.

What you say is as important as how you say it. If you’re located in the downtown area of a city and most of your customers are going to be under the age of 30, you need to talk like they do. You should even be referencing their favorite music, TV shows, and movies, maybe even creating a menu item that’s the favorite of a local indie rock band or food writer. Our pals Ben and Jerry did that with the bands Phish and the Grateful Dead. They knew their target market really loved their music, and the bands shared their cultural perspective, so they developed Phish Food and Cherry Garcia.

Think back to your world—the people, places, and things you and your soon-to-be customers interact with every day. Once you find your cultural perspective, identify cultural elements that can integrate this perspective into your customer experience. This will provide a second layer to your food truck brand that speaks to your core clientele. That core must identify themselves with your brand over your competitors. It’s the same reason people drink Starbucks or Dunkin Donuts coffee. Either you’re a Starbucks person or a Dunkin person; rarely is someone both.

In order to choose your cultural perspective, you need to look at your target market to see what makes them tick. Then you have to look at yourself and see what defines you. Make a list of 10 lifestyle characteristics of your target market and then make that same list about yourself. Then compare the lists and analyze the areas in which there are similarities. Once you identify the similarities, narrow them down to two or three and choose the one you believe applies most accurately to the food business.

Let’s say you’re planning a burger truck and you’ve determined that you and your target market both love rock music and computer games. Common sense tells you computer games wouldn’t be the ideal marketing partner for hamburgers, but rock music just might work. Maybe your burger truck could be called Rock Burger or Zeppelin Burger, and the logo and menu could be reflective of rock culture and icons. You can play rock music in your truck and be known for parking outside all the major rock concerts.

Identifying a nonfood connection with your customer is vital to the success of your truck and is critical in defining your branding and marketing efforts.

Knowing Who You’re Feeding

Would you open a lobster roll truck in a college town?

Let’s look into this. I know of a lobster roll truck that does $13,000-plus in revenues every single day. That’s a lot of money for a truck; sounds like a good business to me. Their average cover is around $20 per head, and in the right location the rolls sell like wildfire.

Truck Tales

In food truck terms, a cover is what one person purchases at your truck. If you did 60 covers, you served 60 people. Your average cover is the typical amount that a person spends when dining at your truck. You can figure this out by taking the total revenue for a time period and dividing it by the number of people you served during that time.

I attended Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York. Ithaca is frigid eight months of the year, and it’s mostly inhabited by college kids with very little disposable income. They spend what money they do have on chips, pizza, sandwiches, soda, and beer. A lobster truck selling an expensive item that’s in high demand primarily during the summer months doesn’t seem like it would work there. So even though a lobster roll truck can make a lot of money, the demand probably doesn’t exist among students with little money in freezing cold Ithaca, New York.

A better location for a lobster roll truck would be a high-end beach resort or affluent urban neighborhood during the summer months. Both of these locations have heavy foot traffic and clientele with disposable income. This is an example of allowing macro trends, such as weather and income levels, to build your business. You never want to be fighting the currents. Instead, you want to ride the wave to success.

Profiling Your Food Truck Clientele

The lobster roll example makes it clear that you need to define your target market and match your concept to that market. The target market combined with your product, place, promotion, and price—collectively called the 4 Ps—are the main elements that will determine whether you’ll succeed or fail in the coming months. Determining your target clientele and their demand for your product is crucial to your success.

Truck Tales

A target market is a group of customers that you aim your marketing efforts and product at. They are your ideal customers.

It actually took the people who run the Kogi food truck months before they were able to create awareness within their target market. They were using traditional media to advertise their business, but it turned out their clientele was on the Internet, using blogs and social media, which is actually where most of the clientele for food trucks hang out.

Based on my research, here are some estimates about the typical food truck customer:

Tip

The core group of food truck customers spend hours online each day. They actively seek out the newest and most interesting experiences through niche blogs like Eater.com and online newsletters like Urbandaddy, Thrillist, and Dailycandy.

Most food truck customers are looking for an exotic and rewarding food experience that will both satisfy their craving and provide a story that they can tell their friends. Many may even write their own blogs about their experiences at food trucks and will probably post pictures and reviews on social media pages like Facebook. They aren’t highly price sensitive but are definitely value oriented. If they feel like a truck is ripping them off or taking advantage of them in any way, they’ll be extremely vocal about it.

It’s very important to develop a focused group of customers who will tout your truck’s virtues to their peers. The more regular customers you have, the quicker you’ll reach your tipping point—the point when something reaches critical mass. How will you know when you reach your tipping point? When you show up to your spot and the customers are already waiting for you.

Your food truck clientele is part of the general pool of people who eat at food trucks. Let’s say 100 people eat out in a neighborhood. Fifty of those people are open to eating at food trucks. These people will be your easiest targets. The key is to serve a type of cuisine or item that appeals to as many of these people as possible.

Suppose you specialize in foie gras, an uppity type of duck liver. Even if you make the best foie gras ever, it probably will only appeal to 2 or 3 of the 50 people looking to eat at a food truck.

Your choice of concept and food has a massive effect on your business at the seed level. If you can determine that you’ll be able to appeal to a significant portion of this base level, you know you’ll be able to survive.

Tip

Italian food is the most popular “dining out” cuisine in America. The most popular food items by consumption, whether at home or eaten at restaurants, are hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, and fried chicken. Think about this and study your local market when deciding what you want to sell. It’s always easier to go with the trends and tastes of the public than to go against them.

But really, who just wants to survive? You’re in this to make the big bucks. You might even want some of that A-Rod money. To reach those heights of success, you need to pass the second test: can you be the best in your niche, not just against other food trucks, but as part of the general market?

You shouldn’t just want to have the best burrito truck in the neighborhood. You should want to have the best burritos in the neighborhood, period. If you’re able to achieve this type of critical acclaim or word of mouth, the number of customers you can draw from vastly increases, as do your future opportunities. Can you make your product and brand appealing to the point that you break out of the smaller pool of just “food truck customers” and into the ocean of everyone in your neighborhood who eats out?

Meeting a Demand

When deciding on a concept for your food truck, you must choose something that the market demands. Spend some time in the neighborhoods you plan to target and see which restaurants are busy. If you don’t have time to do that, just drive around after everyone is closed to see who has the most garbage outside. The restaurant doing the most business has the most garbage to throw out.

If the pizza guy is doing well, but the Japanese guy isn’t so busy, what can you infer from this observation? Go into the restaurants and try their food. As long as both products are of similar quality, it probably means there’s a high demand for pizza in the neighborhood but not so many customers for Japanese. Many factors can determine this, but all that matters for your purposes is determining the underlying demand within a particular location.

Try looking for a food type that’s missing in the neighborhood. Maybe there are excellent Chinese and Italian restaurants, but no burger joints. If you assume that neighborhood people like burgers, which is a pretty fair assumption for most places in the United States, then this area would be ripe for a burger truck.

The questions you’re asking yourself may seem like simple ones, but you’d be surprised by how many people don’t ask them. As a food truck operator, it’s of the utmost importance that you do this for multiple locations. You’ll need to have three or four spots that you hit regularly, so scoping out neighborhoods is crucial.

Matching Your Menu to Your Concept

Your menu is everything. You’ll live and die by making the proper selections so that you’re able to produce the food quickly, with low costs and high quality levels.

But that’s only half the battle.

Your menu is the main sales weapon in your arsenal, so you have to present it in an appealing manner. It needs to be attractive enough to lure customers into making a purchase, and then it must maximize the amount of money they spend on that purchase.

Making the Proper Selections

Start with the basics. As I pointed out in Chapter 2, you can only make money with your truck if you keep food and labor costs below 30 percent of gross revenues (after taxes and gratuities). The only way to achieve this goal is by choosing menu items that you can produce and sell for less than that amount.

The more menu items you have, the more food you need to purchase. That means your inventory is higher, and you either have to store it or sell it. If you don’t sell the food it goes bad, and you lose money. You could sell every chicken you have, but if you also have beef on the menu and it doesn’t sell, there goes all your profit.

The more menu items you have, the more prep work you have to do. The more prep work you have to do, the higher your labor costs are. If your labor costs are over 30 percent, you don’t make money.

Any way you slice it, you need to keep menu items to a minimum. Especially on a truck, where your margins are so critical, there’s no room for items that don’t sell or take too long to prep or cook. Choose a maximum of three signature items and stick to them. These items will probably have variations, like toppings or different types of meats, but you should keep those to a minimum as well. With three signature items with three variations each, you already have nine potential preparations, and that’s not even counting sides, desserts, or drinks. Can you see how things can go from simple to complicated very quickly?

I highly recommend no more than 10 items on your truck menu, breaking it down as follows:

The main items and sides should share ingredients in common, so that you keep the total number of ingredients you’re dealing with to a minimum as well.

For instance, if you’re using cheese on your burgers, use the same cheese on your side of cheese fries. Or if you’re selling chili as a side, you could add a chili dog to your menu. By keeping menu items and ingredients to a minimum, and cross pollinating the ingredients in multiple items, you vastly increase your chance for long-term success.

My final recommendation for making proper menu selections is matching your food concept to your truck. In the next chapter I talk about finding the right truck. Your menu should drive the internal design of your truck. You should design your entire kitchen around the cost of producing these items. To keep costs low, don’t pick items that require complex equipment to execute; it will completely throw off your start-up costs and cost way more to maintain and power.

Presenting Your Menu

The presentation of your menu is critical to getting your customers to make a purchase and maximize the revenues from that purchase. Menu psychology is real, and it works. Place a dollar sign or an item in the wrong corner, and you could cost yourself hundreds of dollars in sales and or reprinting. So let’s get to the details.

Grandma’s is always better. When naming items on your menu, personalize them—Aunt Gertie’s Pot Roast Sandwich or Jimmy’s Homemade Hot Sauce. Customers tend to want to get a taste of personalized items more than just simple pot roast sandwiches. Personalize one or two items or variations that you want to push.

Romance the description. What’s the point of putting your heart and soul into making the best hamburger in the world and then just calling it a hamburger on your menu? You need to use words like “handcrafted,” “triple basted,” or “home cooked” to describe the item and the ingredients. Alan’s Signature Burger, the special blend of brisket and Angus beef grilled on an open flame with Tillamook Cheddar Cheese, Applewood Smoked Bacon, and spicy chipotle pepper sauce seems a lot more delicious to me than “hamburger with cheese, bacon, and pepper sauce.”

The top right. Customers read menus the same way they read newspapers. The information on the top right of the page is where their eyes head first. Use this area of your menu to feature your signature item, and magnify its presence by framing it and creating some extra white space around it.

Review, review, review. Nothing will make you look more foolish and cost you more money than mistakes on your menu. Make sure it’s proofread at least three times prior to printing for spelling and grammatical errors. If you can’t put enough time into making sure the menu is perfect, what does that tell customers about your food?

Pricing to Your Market

Pricing is a tricky business. You need to take into account three areas of concern when deciding on your pricing strategy.

Calculating the Price-Value Relationship

You want your items priced high enough that the customer believes your product is high quality, but low enough that they think they’re getting good value for their money. In other words, you need to achieve a balanced price-value relationship.

You can determine your price-value relationship by analyzing your competition. Take a look at other trucks in your area. Make a spreadsheet with pricing for main items, sides, and drinks. You can also guess what an average cover would be by determining what you believe a person would generally order. Take a sample set of at least 10 of your competitors. Your pricing should fall in line with the third or fourth most expensive. That puts you a little above the middle of the pack, which is acceptable for a high-quality truck like yours, and should provide enough value to not alienate customers.

Ensuring Profitability

To make money, the average cost of all your items can’t be more than 30 percent of your retail menu price. When you calculate the cost of producing your item, you should multiply it by 3.33. The result is the minimum price you should be selling the item for. With that said, you can get away with charging more for some items, and for others you’ll have to charge less. The most important factor is that based on your menu mix, the average doesn’t exceed 30 percent.

Truck Tales

Your menu mix is how much of your gross sales each item on your truck accounts for. If you sell $10,000 worth of food and burritos account for $2,000 of those sales, then burritos make up 20 percent of your menu mix.

Downplaying the Price for Customers

Unless you’re offering the deal of the century, which doesn’t send the right quality message, you should always downplay pricing on your menus. Menu psychologists tell us that dollar signs and the word dollar trigger the “pain of paying.” You aren’t in the pain business; you’re in the pleasure business.

Eliminate all dollar signs and use a font that downplays the pricing. Never use a bold or larger font; the idea is to make the price an afterthought. When it comes to cents, .95 is always better than .99, but I recommend no cents at all. And if you want to sell one item more than any of your other items, it pays to put it next to something more expensive or less desirable. Customers tend to purchase items that fall in the middle in terms of pricing. If you want to really push your highest-profit item, put it on the menu next to your most expensive item.

Creating Your Brand

What makes your truck special? Are you giving 10 percent of your profits to charity? Did a famous artist paint your truck? Do you make your own bacon and sausages for your breakfast sandwiches? Are you a comedian who tells a joke to every customer? Are you a celebrity chef? These are all actual ways people have chosen to differentiate their food trucks.

Truck Tales

Fresher than Fresh Snow Cones is a truck based in Kansas City, Missouri, started by Lindsay Laricks. With her boyfriend Brady’s encouragement, Lindsay took her love and knowledge of herbs and applied them to the simplest thing she could think of, snow cones. Instead of using artificial colors and sugary syrups to flavor shaved ice, Lindsay used homegrown herbs. She chose an ideal spot across from Blue Bird Bistro, a popular locavore restaurant, to park her 1957 Shasta trailer (purchased on eBay). The truck was an instant hit; the marriage of fresh, sustainable ingredients with a simple concept and passion, made for a very successful combination.

Remember that your brand must be a manifestation of yourself. First combine what you love with what you know, then take that idea and make it as simple as possible. Your brand is a combination of the product and your cultural perspective.

The name should be no more than three words and must easily identify the type of product you’re serving. Also critical to a successful food truck, the brand you choose should differentiate you from your competitors and be available as a URL (Internet address), Twitter name, and Facebook page.

Testing Your Concept with a Focus Group

There’s no formula for coming up with your brand name, so once you’ve brainstormed for a few days, take your best idea and test it out with a focus group.

Your first step is to create a one-page description of your concept. It should include:

The mission statement should say, in one sentence, what you plan to create or establish. For instance, “Establish the Meatball Factory as the premier meatball food truck in Miami Beach.”

The concept description is more detailed and speaks specifically to what makes your concept unique. For example:

Finally, describe your menu:

You should have samples of the menu items prepared for the group. Invite at least six people to be in your group. Do your best to have people who don’t have a vested interest in your success and won’t be afraid to tell you the truth—even if it might hurt your feelings. You can offer them some sort of compensation if you’d like, but I find that a free meal usually does the trick.

Have a list of questions for the group members to answer anonymously. You want them to give you honest feedback on your idea and food. Sugarcoated answers won’t help you, so it’s important you tell them that. Your questions should have number answers, along with options for additional comments.

Here’s a sample of the kinds of questions you should ask your focus group:

You’ll garner loads of information by listening to the answers to these questions. Most important, you’ll find out how people react to your concept. As much as I can teach you about food trucks, the feedback you receive from unbiased people will show you the true potential of your idea. If the group doesn’t like your idea, it’s important that you understand why. Maybe they love the taste of the food but not the branding. Maybe they like the branding but don’t like the pricing. Maybe they love it all and you’ll be the next Kogi. Nobody knows ahead of time, but I can’t wait to find out.

The Least You Need to Know