Food Truck
The shortcut: A food truck isn't a restaurant on wheels — it's three businesses sharing one kitchen. Lock a fixed weekly lunch location first (the predictable spine), then layer private events for margin, then add festivals last. People who chase festivals before lunch burn out before month six.
Industry: Food & Beverage | Investment level: Medium — $30,000-$80,000 | Time to launch: 10-16 weeks (commissary agreement + county MFV permit + commercial auto policy gate the first paid service)
Best for: Anyone with line-cook or short-order experience, $30-80K capital, patience for county and city permitting, and willingness to cold-walk into office lobbies asking who handles food vendor approvals. What you'll likely make: $4,000-$8,000 month 3, $8,000-$15,000 month 6, $14,000-$25,000 month 12. Math is in Section 4.
Market Opportunity
It's 11:45 on a Friday in a downtown office corridor. Forty people are queued back past the elevator bank, phones in hand, nobody going anywhere. The truck is on its third ticket run of the hour and the owner hasn't looked up from the flat-top since 11:00. By 2pm the generator goes off, the window closes, and $2,100 has moved — without a Yelp ad, without a lease, without a dining room to staff.
That window — three hours, four days a week — is the entire opportunity. A storefront runs lunch and dinner to cover $8,000-$25,000 in monthly rent. A truck runs one daypart and cashes out the same revenue on $400-$1,500/month in commissary rent plus fuel.
The catch: the truck is the easy part. Permits, commissary agreement, commercial auto coverage, and finding the right lunch spot take three months and burn out half the people who try. The ones who push through have a moat the storefront crowd can't copy — they can move. If a construction project kills Tuesday's spot, they're parked elsewhere by Wednesday.
Permit geography matters enormously. Austin and Portland have streamlined mobile food vendor (MFV) processes and designated vending zones. NYC, LA, and Chicago are restrictive — limited legal spots, year-long waitlists in some zones. Research your city before you buy a truck. The National Food Truck Association keeps city-by-city resources.
Start with this idea — free signup, no card required.
