According to The Economist, the food truck industry is worth more than $2 billion. Even though food trucks must deal with various obstacles like unpredictable weather and local regulations, it still remains a thriving industry. From barbecue sandwiches to fusion tacos, you can expect a range of dishes served on these trucks. But it’s important to know the technology that food truck owners usually use. These tools help them manage their businesses and make it easier to deliver food to the customers.
Using a set of software applications is of paramount importance to address the challenges that customers may face. The food industry is all about hitting the right taste buds, and you need to ensure that you do that every time you serve something to your customers. Here are a few technologies that you may use if you want to run a food truck:
Suppose you have a 20 x 8 ft food truck and there are five cooks working simultaneously. Imagine the confusion it would create if they had to deal with at least 10 to 15 customers. It’s easy to mix up the orders and create a mess. This can’t go on for long if you want your food truck business to thrive. Therefore, it’s best to use a mobile POS system.
Most food truck owners these days use this system for two purposes: to take orders so that the cooks can make them swiftly and to process payments. Additionally, it also allows the manager to take customized orders so that the customers can have the best experience while enjoying their food. For example, one of your customers may not like the toppings that you add to your burger. He can request the manager to not add them so, he wouldn’t have to pay as much.
If you can customize the food according to the requirements of your customers, there are high chances that they would come back to your food truck again. Speed and hustle are two qualities of a good food truck business. Taking down orders manually using pen and paper is literally a thing of the past now. Customers may not want to wait for long if you take time to note the orders. Therefore, using a mobile POS system can make it quicker and easier for your food truck manager to take down orders. Most importantly, it would reduce the chances of the cooks mixing up the orders and delivering the wrong order to the wrong person.
When you start a food truck business, you want as many customers to find out about your food truck as possible. You may start with a word-of-mouth campaign, but it may not be effective in the long run. That’s why food truck owners use real-time location apps to make their trucks discoverable.
The whole point of these apps is to make sure that more customers know about your business. They would feel tempted to come to your food joint and grab a bite. Moreover, if you stick to a specific location, it will make it difficult for you to expand your customer base. Using the location, you can assess where you had the best response. The more locations you explore around your city, the more customers you may acquire. The more customers you acquire, the more chances you create to expand your business.
From the customers’ perspective, they will know the location of your food truck and its service hours if they use the same app. The real-time tracking system ensures that more customers can discover your food truck and come to taste your food. Additionally, you can share your food truck’s location with existing customers. They may come over to have a bite and even share the location tracker with their friends and colleagues so that they can also join.
You can also use the location app to reach out to your social media followers. For example, if you are planning to explore a new location in the city, you can upload a post saying that your food truck is now open at so and so area.
What if you stock up the raw chicken in the morning and by evening you see that they are stale? The chicken is smelling, and you can’t serve it anymore. You must shut your food truck down for the day and deal with the loss. It’s frustrating if this happens often. Instead of letting this continue, you can use a food safety system in your food truck.
As a food truck owner, you need to keep a few things in mind regarding food safety, such as disposing of the wastewater after cooking, filling up the water tank regularly, cleaning the water tank, and ensuring that the food maintains its appropriate temperature.
Since food trucks have limited space, it may become difficult to maintain the right temperature. Not maintaining the right temperature may lead to the food becoming stale. Once you have a food safety system in place, it can measure the temperature of the respective ingredients. For example, chicken should be stored at a specific temperature than veggies.
Most importantly, these systems can automate food safety checks. It’s time consuming if you manually check each and every ingredient and keep track of their temperatures in a record book. Once you install a food safety system in your food truck, it will keep updating the temperatures to give your cooks an idea of which items to use and which ones to avoid.
Managing a food truck is no joke, especially when there are multiple cooks and hundreds of customers. If you don’t want to mix up the orders and serve the wrong food, it’s better that you use automated apps that make food ordering and payment processing easier. This would not only streamline the process of serving customers but also reduce customer frustrations and increase their trust in your food truck. Most food truck owners say that it would have been an uphill task if they had to manage everything manually. With these technologies, it’s now easier to handle multiple customers and their orders.