Starting a food truck is one thing but accelerating food truck growth and expanding your food truck empire is an entirely different challenge. The best thing to do is focus on the following food truck growth tips. Hundreds of food trucks have used these principles and applied them to their food trucks with varying levels of success.
5 Food Truck Growth Tips
Increase Capacity
This is usually easier said than done, but the big problem for most food trucks is that they quickly reach capacity and can’t perform at a higher level. If you can only hire enough employees to maintain a single 4 hour shift each a day, it’s going to be difficult to increase revenue.
The obvious solution is to increase your food truck’s capacity by either hiring additional employees or using your current staffing levels to operate at least two 3 to 4 hour shifts every day.
It is important to understand that increasing capacity usually comes with the need for additional capital. In order to increase capacity, you may need to identify and eliminate unproductive components (i.e. low margin menu items, etc…) within your food truck business, reallocate funds, or make a pivot. One or all all of these strategies can all be good when you’re looking to accelerate your food truck growth.
Use Technology
Using the technology available for food trucks and other small businesses can help you gain traction. While this isn’t a long-term strategy it’s helped a lot of food truck grow in their early days. Using social media and accounting software will help you spend time on the small details of your business instead of spending valuable time monitoring your truck’s online reputation and financial numbers.
Upsell & Cross-sell
If your food truck has a solid existing customer base, upselling and cross-selling are great strategies to use in order to maximize the value of each of these customers. The biggest benefit here is that there’s no additional investment in advertising or marketing. You’ve already earned these customers. You just need to get them to increase their visits and average ticket price.
The best way to upsell and cross-sell is to clearly explain the benefits. Show your customers the advantage of using these deals. Not only will this get your customers to spend more on each visit, but you will build more trust and confidence in your mobile food business.
RELATED: Food Truck Upselling Tips That Won’t Turn Off Customers
Add New Revenue Streams
After you’ve spent enough time in the mobile food industry, you’ll likely begin to understand your customers more and understand what they really want. This gives a food truck vendor the unique opportunity. Add additional streams of revenue (through new menu items and/or services such as catering) and jump start your food truck growth to new levels.
Test, Measure & Analyze
Above everything else, you can’t forget to test, measure, and analyze everything you do within your food truck business.
If you aren’t using the maximum yield from your bulk food purchases you are throwing profits into the trash. If you regularly have employees standing around with nothing to do, it’s time to look at your scheduling process. Are you consistently see customers throwing away a small portion of some of your menu items? Maybe it’s time to reconsider the portions of each of those items.
The Bottom Line
Don’t miss out on chances to identify issues, find opportunities, and motivate food truck growth.
Have you used these strategies or something similar in your food truck? Did they bring you food truck growth? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Share them with us in the comment section, our food truck forum or social media. Facebook | Twitter
