Improving food truck profitability is one of the first steps to expanding and growing your food truck business. After all, if more of each sales dollar falls to your bottom line, you will have more resources available to try different strategies. Many of the changes that can be made to improve your food truck profitability are simple adjustments to how your food truck is operated and can be installed with ease.

Tips For Improving Your Food Truck Profitability

Offer Deals On Slow Days

Since most food trucks experience less traffic at some point of the week, think about offering a discounted combo meals on those days. You could also consider branding certain days of the week. For example, Thursdays could be targeted towards kids and your truck can offer specials you’ve found are popular with this demographic. Finding innovative ways to draw customers in on slow business days is a great way to improve overall food truck profitability.

Analyze Each Menu Item

Consider evaluating the profitability and sales record for every item on your menu to determine if it is priced appropriately. If a menu item has low sales and a low profit margin, consider either raising the price of the item or eliminating it from the menu.

RELATED: Hidden Food Costs Can Kill Your Food Truck Profits

Offer New Items With Taste Tests

When considering adding a new food item to the menu, consider offering free taste tests to customers to gauge its popularity before adding it. This is particularly helpful for unconventional items, since it’s difficult to know whether or not they’ll be well-received. Another way to test the popularity of products is to offer them seasonally and measure their success over the season.

Purchase A POS System

Consider using a mobile point-of-sale system. With this technology, window service staff communicates instantly by sending orders immediately after they are placed. Having a POS system has been shown to improve the speed and accuracy of meal preparation and can lead to an improvement in overall customer satisfaction.

Consider Other Technology

Aside from POS systems, there are many other ways to integrate technology into your food truck to maximize efficiency. This in turn leads to higher food truck profitability. Consider scheduling management systems so you can spend more time with customers and less time scheduling. Another thing you can do is try headsets to help servers who work outside of the truck communicate with the cooks. For customers, look into apps to allow them to order ahead and avoid your truck’s long lines.

Evaluate Current Supplier Contracts

Reassess your current supplier contracts to make sure you are getting the best deal possible. Consider making a short list of the top selling menu items along with their ingredients and using this list to compare prices quickly among various suppliers. If there are other suppliers offering more competitive prices, think about switching suppliers or using their prices as leverage to negotiate new contracts with current suppliers.

RELATED: Negotiate Better Deals from Your Food Truck Suppliers

Buy Fresh Produce Locally

Fresh ingredients often don’t have a very long shelf life. Buying locally cuts shipping time, thus giving your food truck more time to use the fresh produce and reduce waste.

RELATED: Marketing Your Food Truck By Using Local Produce

Find Used Equipment

Consider used equipment on items that do not need to be purchased brand new. If you are looking into buying used equipment, try using the auction method to purchase items due to the extensive evaluations of the equipment before it is sold at an auction house.

Check Your Refrigerator

Consider conducting daily refrigerator checks. These will make sure the temperatures in your refrigerator is not drifting below the required level to prevent overpaying on energy generation. This could be part of the opening or closing process for employees to complete. Furthermore, conduct annual inspections on refrigerant charge. Incorrect refrigerant charge can reduce efficiency by up to 20 percent and can also increase your risk of equipment failure.

The Bottom Line

No matter how much your food truck generates in sales, the most important key is generating profit. Profit is what provides opportunities for future growth and expansion. Implement these cost-saving measures in your food truck and you’ll begin to see improvements in your food truck profitability.

Do you have any other food truck profitability tips? Share your thoughts in the comment section or social media. Facebook | Twitter