Food Truck Profit Calculator

A food truck and a restaurant sit at opposite ends of the same trade-off. The truck skips restaurant rent, so its fixed base is small: finance or lease payments, insurance, permits, and a pitch fee. What it takes on instead is a cost that moves with every trading day, because fuel, setup and pack-down, and the pitch itself recur each time the wheels turn. Mobility is the compensation. A truck can follow office lunch traffic on weekdays and events at the weekend, which a fixed dining room cannot do.

Whether that trade-off pays is a question about fixed and variable costs rather than about food. Ingredients scale with sales, so a quiet month shrinks the food bill alongside the takings. Labour, finance payments and insurance do not move: they land whether the window opens or not.

Quick example

With days per month of 22 and avg items per day of 150 (plus avg item price of 8 and food cost of 30%), the result is 10,480.00.

Revenue is 26,400 for the month. Food at 30% takes 7,920 out, labour another 5,000, and truck fixed costs 3,000, leaving 10,480 and a net margin of 39.7%. That is a generous month, and the arithmetic thins out fast in a quieter one. Hold everything else and drop to 100 items a day: revenue falls to 17,600 and profit to 4,320, so a third fewer items has taken about 59% of the profit with it. At the same price, roughly 65 items a day is the point where a month covers labour and fixed costs and nothing more.

Which inputs matter most

You enter Days per Month, Avg Items per Day, Avg Item Price, Food Cost %, Labour Monthly, and Truck Fixed Monthly.

Volume dominates, and volume is mostly a question of where the truck parks. Food cost percentage comes second: moving it from 30% to 35% costs 1,320 a month on the same 26,400 of revenue, roughly an eighth of the profit for five percentage points. Price is the quiet one. Adding 1 to the average item price adds 2,310 a month at this volume, because 70% of every extra unit of price survives the food cost deduction and the other costs stay flat.

What's happening under the hood

Revenue is days multiplied by items multiplied by price. Food cost is revenue multiplied by the food cost percentage. Profit is revenue minus food, labour and fixed costs, and net margin is profit divided by revenue.

Two simplifications sit behind that. Fuel and pitch fees belong in the fixed box here even though they climb with trading days, so a heavy month reads slightly better than it trades. Nothing in the model covers tax, waste, discounts, card processing fees, seasonality, or the repair that arrives without warning. One more thing decides how to read the output: an owner who pays themselves through Labour Monthly is looking at profit that sits on top of a wage, while an owner who leaves that field near zero is looking at their own earnings.