The food truck costs that aren't on anybody's spreadsheet

The truck is the easy line item. You can price a used step van with a hood and a flat top in an afternoon, and somewhere between fifty and a hundred grand you'll find one that runs. Newer custom builds go well past that. Whatever number you land on, write it down and then stop looking at it, because that number isn't the one that closes food trucks.

What closes food trucks is everything the seller never mentions and the business plan template has no row for.

You don't get to park it at your house

Almost every health department in the country requires a licensed commissary. That's a commercial kitchen where you prep, wash, fill your fresh water tank, dump your gray water and, in a lot of jurisdictions, physically park overnight. You can't legally store your inventory in your garage. You can't drain your sink into the storm drain behind the auto parts store.

So you rent. Commissary rates vary wildly by market, from a couple hundred a month for a bare-bones agreement with a church kitchen or a pizza shop that's closed on Mondays, to over a thousand for a real shared-use facility with walk-in space and a dish pit. Some are hourly. Some make you buy a block of time whether you use it or not.

Call three of them before you buy a truck. Not after. If your city has exactly one commissary and it has a waiting list, that's your business plan, not a detail.

Permits are per-city, and they don't care that you already have one

You'll need a mobile food facility permit from the county health department, a business license, a seller's permit for sales tax, and a fire inspection covering your suppression system and propane setup. Standard. Budget for it.

The part that surprises people is the geography. Cross into the next county for a good lunch spot and you may need a whole separate permit there, with its own fee and its own inspection. Some cities require a commissary inside their own limits. Some ban vending within a certain distance of a brick-and-mortar restaurant. Some require you to move every thirty minutes, which is a great way to ruin a lunch rush.

Before you commit, drive the five locations you actually plan to work and look up the vending rules for each one. Write the permit cost next to each. That's your real market map.

Plan review will hold your build hostage

If you're building out a truck, most health departments want to approve the plans before the first sheet of stainless goes in. Sink counts, hand sink placement, water heater capacity, tank sizes, surface finishes, ventilation. Miss one and you're cutting it back out.

I've watched a guy have to add a fourth sink to a finished build because he had a three-compartment wash setup and no separate hand sink within reach of the prep area. That's two weeks and a plumber, on a truck that was already three months late.

Buy used and inspected if you can. A truck that already passed in your county is worth a premium over a prettier one from two states away.

It's a truck and a restaurant, and both break

Here's the math nobody runs. You've got a commercial kitchen bolted into a vehicle that gets driven, bounced, heated to 110 degrees and shut off wet. Everything fails faster than it would in a building.

Your generator is the one that'll get you. A good one burns fuel all day, needs oil changes every hundred hours or so, and dies loudly in the middle of service when it feels like it. Carry oil. Learn where the fuel filter is. Know what your fridge holds temp for if the power drops, because the health inspector will ask and the answer determines whether you dump three hundred dollars of protein.

Then add propane, fuel for the truck itself, tire wear on a heavy vehicle, brake jobs, and the fact that a transmission failure means zero revenue until it's fixed. Set aside real money for this monthly. If you're not putting a few hundred a month into a repair fund, you're borrowing from a breakdown that's already scheduled.

Insurance, and the certificates events demand

You need commercial auto, general liability, and product liability. If you have any employee, workers comp in most states. Then the event organizers, breweries and corporate parks you want to serve will ask for a certificate of insurance naming them as additional insured, sometimes at a coverage level higher than what you bought.

Getting that endorsement added is usually cheap. Not having it on a Thursday for a Saturday event is a lost day. Ask your agent for the certificate process before you need it, and keep a PDF on your phone.

The revenue side lies to you

Gross sales at a busy festival look incredible. Then subtract the vendor fee, which might be a flat four hundred or a percentage of your gross, plus a power hookup charge, plus the two extra people you had to pay to handle that line, plus card processing on nearly every ticket, plus the food you prepped for a bigger crowd than showed.

Rain is the other half. You can't sell into an empty street, and your fixed costs don't take the day off. Commissary rent, insurance, the truck payment and the permit all bill the same in February as they do in July. In a lot of climates, a food truck is a seven-month business pretending to be a twelve-month one.

Catering is where the money usually hides. One private event with a set headcount and a deposit beats three speculative lunch services. It's less romantic than a line around the block, and it pays better.

About the failure rate

You'll see people throw around a number, usually somewhere around six in ten closing in the first few years. Treat it with suspicion. Nobody tracks mobile food businesses cleanly, closures get counted differently depending on who's counting, and plenty of trucks "fail" by being sold to someone who runs them fine.

What's honestly true is this: the ones that go under mostly don't go under because the food was bad. They go under because the owner financed a hundred-thousand-dollar truck on a five-year note, then discovered the good spots were taken, the good events were sold out to vendors with three-year relationships, and January exists.

How to find out cheap

Rent a truck for four Saturdays before you buy one. Owners rent them out more often than you'd think, and a day rate plus your food cost is the cheapest tuition available.

Or run a stall first. A canopy, a table and a permit in a farmers market gets you the two answers that matter: do people buy this, and can you produce eighty covers in ninety minutes without losing your mind? If the answer to either is no, you just saved six figures.

And price your own labor before you sign anything. If the truck nets forty thousand a year and you worked seventy hours a week for it, you didn't build a business. You bought yourself a hard job with a loan attached.

Then go do it anyway, with your eyes open and a smaller note.