How can I make my food truck more profitable

Posted by Damian Roberti on May 11, 2022

How can I make my food truck more profitable

How can I make my food truck more profitable? You might be asking yourself, if you're a food truck entrepreneur, well, guess what? This whiteboard's going to get filled in 10 ways. You can actually use your food truck to increase profitability, and I'm going to break down each one of them. And there might be a few of them on here that you may have never thought of. This is going to be some outside-the-box thinking, and we're going to make your food truck even more profitable in this video. And we're going to get to that right now.

All right. So we are back and I'm going to get into the 11 ways that you can monetize your food truck. In my fantastic drawing, there are 11 different ways that you can use a food truck to make money other than simply driving it to a food truck park, fair festival, parking it and selling product out of the window. like a robot. This will help you make way more money now. Well, this takes some extra work and effort on your part. Of course, nothing happens for free and nothing happens without you working at it. But several of these, and as I'll explain, once you get them up and running, they will run themselves. So let's dive right into it. Of course, welcome to marketing food online. It's Damien Roberti, founder and CEO of marketing food online. This channel is dedicated to you, the food entrepreneur, and giving you some outside-the-box thinking on how to create food businesses, food products, and basically develop your dream.

How can I make my food truck more profitable

If it is all about food and making money with it, So let's dive right into it. You have the best merchandise.might remember, if you've seen it on my channel, you've seen the other video I did a few years ago. I actually did a channel video about this merchandise. I was talking about merch, how to use a logo or some type of design for your food truck. If you've got a brand name of some kind, you can tap into the market. Sorry about that. Tap into the market of merch. Now, how does this work, Damien? And I've heard this before, but how do I set that up? I will also have several links directly to the websites that I'm going to talk about how to create merch. You actually upload your designer logo to these websites, and I'm not going to go through the whole list of 'em.

There's quite a few of them, several of them that you can actually use, but you basically create a logo or a design or some type of branded look on your hats, on your hoodies, on your shirts, on your t-shirts. Anything that you can wear, or even cell phone covers and mugs and all kinds of stuff, even posters, believe it or not, but you upload them on there. You must create an account. So what happens is, as you send customers, and I'll get to that in a minute from the website and the QR code, I'll explain how this works is that the merchandise website itself will print, create, and ship the product on your behalf. And you get a portion of that money from the merch that is sold with your logo or your design. Now, if you don't have a logo or design, also again, check down below the video in the description section. I'll have a ton of links to fiber where you can actually get a design or a brand looking logo for your food truck.

How can I make my food truck more profitable

So you don't have to design one yourself. You could simply tell them what you're looking for. And the designer or graphic artist will create it for you. You simply take that then and upload that onto the sites and basically sell merch while you're at events or even while you're sleeping, because the website is running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. That's one revenue source that you don't really have to do anything for because they simply make the product and ship it to your customer. So how do I increase my profitability on my food truck? That is number one. Number two, you want to head over and you want to get a package of your product. Now, what does that mean? Damian? Well, packaged food products are like hot sauces. If you have a chicken wing truck and you have your own flavor of hot sauce, you know what?

You should be bottling it. You need to have a co-packer, not you, because you are too busy running your food truck. Find a co-packer, which, by the way, again, I'll have a list of the links down below on our website for co-packers. You can have your hot sauce, barbecue sauce, or salsa. If it happens to be a seasoning packet or seasoning mix, if you have a seasoning blend and it's a special one that you've created, and you use it on your food truck, why are you not selling that? Anything that you're making that's unique. If it's a marinade, if any of that stuff can be bottled, packaged, and put out there to sell, well, that sounds great, but I don't have time to operate an online business. Hold on. I'll explain how this works. The first step is to create your product. You get a co-packer to make it. They're actually, believe it or not, not in the hot sauce business.

For instance, there are websites out there that already have the ability to co-pack your product and bottle it. Once you get it made, you could tap into a website like Amazon or Amazon FBA. And if you're not familiar with how that works, it's very, very simple. It does take work to get it up and running. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to simplify the process, but it is simple. When you understand how it works, Once you get the product made, it gets sent to Amazon's warehouse. Amazon FBA is a process in which they will pull it from their warehouse shelf and ship it to your customer.So there is a very large amount of automation involved with this process where you're not having to run a food truck, package your product, ship it to people. Yes, you do have to maintain inventory. Check the daily sales, look at how your account's doing, and run a business too.

How can I make my food truck more profitable

It doesn't really completely run on autopilot, but this way does create another stream of revenue with your food truck and your hot sauce, your seasoning packet, your barbecue sauce, and so on. You get the idea, whatever it is that you've created, that's unique and it's a food product. Why are you not selling that outside of the food truck? So, that is another way for you to do this. So the other way is to do that. If Amazon FBA is something that you don't want to get into, there are fulfillment centers. These are warehouses where you can take your product and ship it to them, or have the co-packer ship it to the warehouse. And you have a website or a store on eBay, an Etsy store, a store on Walmart.com, and you could be selling your product and they do the fulfillment of it.

All you need to do is maintain the daily operations. As far as checking the inventory, getting the co-packer to produce more of the product for you, whatever it may be to make sure that you get the fulfillment center refilled when they sell out. And then that is another way for your food truck business to make more money. Number three, create a website. Yes, a food truck. Every food truck should have a website. And you know why? Because number one, once you have a website and you've put content on there, you put some information about your business. You put some information about how your food truck started. Maybe a little story behind it. Maybe a couple of blog posts or an article on how you got started in the industry. Or maybe you have some advice because you're a successful food truck entrepreneur. And you want to share that with others.

How can I make my food truck more profitable

Guess what? You can monetize the traffic to your website by adding sense, which is set up by Google. We'll throw an advertisement up on your website. Once you've developed and built out a website for it, And you generate money from ads alone. Right now, we have a website that generates nearly a thousand dollars a month. It's pretty much on autopilot, just because the ads from people visiting our website get paid for. That is another way that your food truck, if it's Damien's food, truck.com, it doesn't matter. Create some content, put some information up there. And then, that way, you can monetize this and create another stream of income, which could generate a few hundred dollars or a couple thousand dollars a month because of your food truck. Number four, offering catering. You don't always have to take your truck and physically park it at a location for eight to 10 hours on the weekend.

On a Saturday, there might be an opportunity to make even more money. And it's only a few hours and it's not as many hours when you cater an event. It may be a smaller timeframe, but you're still making money. Or if you're in a part of the country where maybe during winter or late fall, it's a little more difficult to have people come out because it might be snowy, or it might be bad weather, or it might be just really cold and people don't go out much. That's fine. Then that way, you can advertise your catering business and do events year round. So you're utilizing and using that food truck 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year. So if you haven't done catering before, that's okay, you can learn how to do it then, because if you know how to prepare food and make it on your food truck, why can't you just prepare a huge quantity of it and bring it to someone's event and set it up catering?

How can I make my food truck more profitable

That's another way to use your food truck, kind of in the off season or year round. Next up is number five. Yes. YouTube. If you own, actually, in my opinion, if you own any business, you need to be on YouTube. Why could you be creating a ton of video content while attending a food truck event?There is a ton of food truck information that you could be downloading, even up to YouTube on how to do certain recipes, maybe some behind-the-scenes videos of how you get prepped for the day or an event. Once you get to the event, have someone videotape one of your crew members. You don't need to have a big camera. You could do it on a phone. All of my videos are made on my smartphone. You don't have to have a big set with lights and all that stuff; just videotape it and put it on YouTube.

Why? Because you can monetize, once you reach the minimum of a thousand subscribers and 4,000 hours of watch time, all those videos get monetized and you can make money. Trust me, I make pretty good money doing videos on YouTube.

How can I make my food truck more profitable

Yes. You need to have a blog on the website back here. Number three. Why? Because again, monetizing your blog and, believe it or not, there are even some affiliate programs where you can add additional streams of revenue associated with affiliate marketing. Yes. even with a food truck. If you've got products that you can combine with your product, or if you're selling a product online, you could add links directly to your website to sell more of your product because of your blog. That's a way of monetizing it and making money. That way That's six ways. Number seven, QR codes. If you are not familiar with a QR code, I'll put one on the screen. There. QR codes are like these square, goofy looking barcodes, but guess what? You can create a barcode for free. And I have a video here on YouTube. As a matter of fact, I'll put a link to that video down below.

In this description, you can create a QR code that links once it's snapped and it's taken by someone's smartphone at your event or downloaded onto their smartphone. You can link up your website and you can sell products through the QR code. Did you know that you could do that? So this is another way to monetize your food truck because people that are at your event, as an example, if you have a barbecue food truck, and let's go back to the sauce thing, you have an amazing barbecue sauce and you have it bottled and you're selling it on Amazon. Guess what? You can link up a QR code. A person can scan it. They say, "Oh my God, Damian, this is amazing." This barbecue Do you guys sell the barbecue sauce? We sure do scan my QR code. It'll take you right to my Amazon stop.

How can I make my food truck more profitable

Boom. You just sold more of your product. You're creating more revenue streams with QR codes for your food truck. You can link it to anywhere you want. Oh, and by the way, if you link it up to your website, all that traffic, by the way, the customers keep going over to your website. All that website traffic is getting monetized. Every time someone goes there and Google throws an ad up, you make even more money. That's another way. Number eight. Yes. Donate some free stuff to charity. Why not local events that you can get into that are charitable events that you're going to do for free? You're going to show up. There is nothing better than free marketing. When you show up to an event that you've done for free, and it's a charitable one, and there's hundreds of people, if not, maybe a couple of thousand people that see your truck, that is giving you free exposure in the community, and you're doing something good.

It's a win-win, of course. But on the other hand, you're also getting exposure to several hundred or a couple thousand people. And you know what? Maybe there's like 20 of them that come up and say, "Hey, I hear you do catering." Can I get your card? Because I have an event next week, I will donate and do charitable events as much as possible. By the way, if you're running a food business, you can actually deduct all those charitable donations, including all of the food that you're giving away for free, on your taxes. So donate to charity. Number nine: This may sound odd, but a lot of people have begun to do this. And I heard this in California's door dash and Uber eats. If you're at a location and that location, you're doing it on a regular basis. Guess what? A lot of food trucks are now tapping into the concept of Uber Eats a Door Dash because people within the community who can't make it to your food truck know that Damien has this food truck out there on the corner.

How can I make my food truck more profitable

This weekend He loved the tacos that he made. They go on to the door dash or go on to a delivery service. They'll come and pick it up at the food truck and deliver it. Now again, the margins might be a little bit smaller because of the fee that's involved with Uber Eats, DoorDash, and the delivery service. Don't get me wrong. But you've got to think long term. You're thinking of the concept that more and more people are going to have an opportunity to taste and try your food. If it's somebody who's a regular with you, they may have a house full of friends that have never heard of your food truck, but because Uber eats and they delivered a big old batch of your barbecue. Now they're going to come down there on the weekend because they just had some at their friend's house. They never even knew you were there.

It's another way to think outside the box, guys, to make sure your product gets into as many hands and mouths as possible. That's the way you have to approach it. It's a marketing technique. Next up, Number 10 is a podcast. Believe it or not, Let's go back for a moment. I actually turn all of my YouTube videos into podcasts. We have another stream of revenue because I get paid. Every time someone listens to my podcast, I have three podcasts. We have about 400 episodes and, little by little, gradually, they're expanding and having more and more people listen to and find our podcast online. That actually pays me because I get additional revenue and ads from my podcast. Now, do you have to learn podcasting and all, get all the tents, and spend all that time? No, you simply turn your YouTube videos into podcasts by downloading the audio and uploading them directly onto a podcast platform.

You may have to edit a little bit here and there, but it's not a lot of time, and that generates additional ad revenue because of your food truck. Okay, We have right now, I think we've had nearly 60 or 70,000 downloads of our podcasts, and I'm not. I taught myself how to podcast, because I do all this stuff. I do this stuff with my wife. So I had to learn how to do it. But 70,000 S has made us money. So also the last one, number 11, the bonus, I guess you could say the bonus, because I said, I'd give you 10, but here's 11 free. Give me something to weigh for free. Now Damien, how can I make money when I give something away for free? Here's what I mean. If you're at a food truck event and it's a family event and there are a lot of kids,

What if you offered with the purchase of a free kids' meal, you gave them something or any meal that you've got necessarily a kid's meal. We're not turning to McDonald's or burger king here. But if you give away a free kid for any kid that comes up, they get a free bottle of water. They get a free soda or a juice box. Okay, but you're gonna sell another meal. There might be a family or a parent who would love to see that they get something for free. When you put your menu board out in front of your food truck, make sure one of the biggest words on the top of it is today only all kids who order a meal, get a free drink. We will not charge you guess what? Out of the five or six food trucks that are at that event. And you're giving away free juice boxes.

There's a good likelihood you're gonna do more business. So giving something away for free actually makes you money because that parent can say, wow, you know what? I'm gonna get another extra hot dog then from him. And I'll get some fries for little Johnny and we'll get a free drink. So you can get creative with that too. It doesn't necessarily have to be a beverage. Maybe it's a dessert. Maybe they spend $50 or $20 with you. They all get free ice cream or scoop of ice cream or something. But think it outside the box. The idea again is to turn over as many plates as possible and to get more people, to try your food. So this is your food truck. Those are 11 ways that you can actually make money with it. And many of them, like I said, maybe outside the box, but setting these up may take a little bit of time up front.

But when it's done, they're gonna automate your bank and they're gonna automate your cash flow and they're gonna make you more money. Don't just think that your food truck has to sit in a spot on the side of the road and hope somebody drives by and buys your food. Start getting creative. There's a lot of ways that you can make money with your food truck. So how can I make money with my food truck and how can I make my food truck more profitable? That's 11 ways. If there's some other ways that you know that I don't let me know down below in the comments, I'll see you guys on our next video.