Food trucks are an entrenched part of the culinary landscape, offering an array of delicious and unique dishes to food lovers in all sorts of uncommon locations. From local street corners to large festivals to mobile cadaver labs, (yes, I once served the crew at a mobile cadaver lab), food trucks bring convenience, variety, and flavor to people where they already are. However, when a food truck is asked to serve a larger than normal number of people in a short amount of time, things can quickly become chaotic. Proper preparation, effective strategies, and a well-organized team are essential to ensure an event such as this runs smoothly.

In this blog post, we’ll explore how to prepare for and execute larger-than-normal food truck events, focusing on the key strategies that will help you manage a high volume of customers while maintaining the quality and timeliness of your service.

1. Pre-Event Preparation: The Key to Success

Before the big day arrives, preparation is paramount. When handling large food truck events, the difference between success and failure often comes down to how well you plan and prepare beforehand.

a. Know Your Numbers

The first step in preparing for a large event is understanding how many people you’re expecting. Work with the event organizers to get an accurate estimate of the crowd size. You may be asked to serve several hundred people in less than an hour when it typically takes you a full hour to fulfill less than one hundred orders. Knowing an accurate headcount will help you plan accordingly. In addition to total attendance, you’ll want to know how long the event lasts, the schedule of peak food demand, and any other logistical details (such as parking, access to water, or power supply).

Once you have these numbers, assess your menu to determine how much of each item you need to prepare. If your food truck serves complex dishes that require a lot of prep time, you may want to streamline your menu for the event. This will allow your team to focus on speed and quality while managing the large volume of orders. Specifically, if you know you are being asked to serve more people than you comfortably can while operating in your standard manner, explain the situation to your event contact and suggest that each customer receive the exact same meal.  This will greatly increase your productivity, and you should only find yourself in this situation if a single payer is requiring that you serve food to an entire captive audience.  

b. Ingredients and Inventory Management

Stocking up on ingredients is one of the most critical aspects of food truck event preparation. Having enough inventory is essential to avoid running out of food mid-event, which could damage your reputation and leave customers dissatisfied. Here’s what you should do:

• Estimate Ingredient Quantities: Take the crowd size into account and estimate how much of each ingredient you will need. Be sure to overestimate slightly to account for spikes in demand.
• Prep Ahead: Prepping ingredients before the event starts can save a lot of time. Cut vegetables, marinate meats, and make sauces ahead of time so you can spend less time on prep during the event and more time serving food. Having said this, do not prep in such a way that you are likely to end up with significant amounts of food waste that hurt your bottom line.
• Supply Backup: It’s a good idea to have a backup supplier who can deliver extra ingredients during the event if necessary. However, if you do your job well you should rarely have to rely on this safety valve.

c. Staffing and Team Organization

When preparing for a larger-than-normal food truck event, your team becomes your most valuable asset. Make sure you have enough hands on deck to handle the expected volume of orders. Staff should be organized based on their roles, and clear communication is crucial.  It is equally important not to overstaff, which will cut into your profit margin and potentially cause workers to get in the way of one another in a very tight space.

• Assign Specific Roles: Clearly define the roles of each team member in advance. For example, assign someone to handle customer interactions, another person to cook and prepare food, and someone else to manage the cash register or payment system if necessary. If possible, designate someone as the “event coordinator” to oversee everything and troubleshoot any issues that arise.
• Consider Hiring Temporary Staff: If your regular team isn’t large enough for the event, consider hiring additional temporary staff or volunteers who are familiar with your food and can help with food prep, service, or cleaning.
• Training and Communication: Ensure your team is properly trained on how to handle high-pressure situations. Clear and ongoing communication is key to avoiding mistakes and delays. 

2. Optimize Your Food Truck Setup

The layout and organization of your food truck are essential when it comes to working efficiently during high-volume events. A cluttered or inefficient setup can lead to delays, accidents, unnecessary ingredient shortages, and stress. Consider the following points:

a. Streamlined Kitchen Design

Make sure your food truck kitchen is organized in a way that minimizes movement and maximizes productivity. This means having the right equipment in the right places to make the cooking process as smooth as possible.

• Efficient Workflow: Position items like cooking equipment, prep stations, and storage in a logical flow. For example, raw ingredients should be close to the prep area, while cooked food should be easily accessible for packaging.
• Ready-to-Use Stations: Ensure that every station is stocked with the necessary tools, utensils, and ingredients. Having all your tools in place and organized will help your team save time and reduce errors.
• Everything Has A Place: Impress upon your staff that everything in your kitchen has a specific place and immediately after use all things must be returned to their specific place.  This is the only way to ensure that all workers know where to find anything they might need at any time.
• Extra Storage: Consider traveling with extra coolers with ice to make room for additional product on very big days.  Coolers are ideal for soft drink storage since you do not need to hold them at or below a specific temperature to stay compliant with the health code. Moving your soft drinks to coolers will also limit how often you have to open your refrigerators, which will both tax them less and help everything inside of them hold at its proper cooling temperature.

b. Create a Customer-Friendly Service Window

Your service window is the primary point of contact between your team and your customers, and it should be optimized to reduce wait times and enhance the overall experience. It should also provide a clean and appealing line of sight for anyone who looks into your kitchen. Here are some tips for a better customer experience:

• Clear Signage: Ensure your menu is clearly displayed, and consider offering a simplified menu for large events. This helps customers make quicker decisions, reducing their time spent at the window.
• Efficient Payment System: Use a reliable POS (Point of Sale) system to process orders quickly and securely. Digital payment systems, such as mobile apps and contactless cards, can reduce cash handling time.  For particularly large events make arrangements for a single payment at the end of service whenever possible.
• Order Packaging: Make sure your food packaging is sturdy and easy for customers to carry. Consider environmentally friendly packaging options, as this can be a positive selling point for eco-conscious attendees.  Place items that everyone might use, such as napkins, silverware, or condiments into packaging before your event begins so you only have to add temperature sensitive items at the time an order is completed.

3. Handling High Volumes of Orders

When it comes to large events, speed and efficiency are key to keeping the line moving and customers satisfied. Here are some strategies for handling a high volume of orders:

a. Pre-Orders and Online Ordering

Contrary to popular belief, accepting pre-orders and online orders will not speed up service unless you can also reduce how quickly orders are assembled in your kitchen.  If you are already producing orders at your maximum capacity the only way accepting pre-orders may help you is for organizational purposes.  For example, you could choose to accept pre-orders and then assign customers specific pickup times.  However, this relies on customers being trustworthy enough to arrive to pick up their food at a specific time.  When they fail to do so you will inevitably be blamed for a cold product, even though they are the ones at fault. In general, you should not accept pre-orders or online orders unless you are confident it will improve your efficiency and will not create chaos in your serving window.  If you have a food truck or trailer with multiple windows and are in a position to devote an entire window to the pickup of orders placed online such a system may work well for you.  Just be sure to think through all the implications of offering this service before committing to it.

b. Speed Up the Cooking Process

During large events, time is of the essence, and you’ll need to speed up the cooking process without sacrificing the quality of your food.

• Batch Cooking: If possible, cook items in batches ahead of time. For example, grilling several burgers or frying a batch of fries at once can help keep orders moving quickly.
• Quick-Fire Menu Items: Offer a streamlined menu that can be prepared quickly without sacrificing flavor. This allows your team to focus on cooking items that are popular and fast to prepare, rather than dealing with complex or time-consuming dishes.
• Staying One Ahead: For extremely popular items prepare an order or two in advance even if no one has asked for it.  It is likely it will go out in a timely manner, and on the rare occasion it doesn’t throwing away a single order because it got cold will not cost you much.
• Stay Aware: Toward the end of a shift slow down your batch cooking so you do not end up with too much food waste.
• Hot Holding: If you have a specific headcount and are in a situation where you are expected to serve a large group of people at approximately the same time incorporate the use of hot holding devices, like an insulated catering box that can hold a large amount of prepared food above 145 degrees Fahrenheit, to have all your orders ready in advance of your serving time.  Food quality will suffer, but sometimes concessionaires must make concessions in this realm. 

c. Prioritize Orders and Manage Expectations

Managing customer expectations is crucial when you’re dealing with a large number of orders. Ensure that your customers understand that wait times may be longer than usual.

• Communicate Wait Times: Set up a system for managing wait times, such as displaying a “15-minute wait” sign if the line is long. Transparency helps manage expectations and makes customers feel more patient.
• Prioritize Orders Based on Demand: For events with peak times, prioritize orders based on the type of food. For example, you may want to cook and serve high-demand items first, such as hot dogs or burgers, while leaving more complex dishes for later, or even eliminating complex dishes completely.
• Key Person Communication: Talk to your event contact openly and kindly if they are simply requesting too much food in too short a time period.  They will appreciate your expertise and may be willing to provide more time to serve, send batches of customers out in small groups so that no one has an excessively long wait time, or come up with other creative solutions to help your appearance go more smoothly.  This is also the person who needs to know and agree to any changes you make to your everyday menu for the sake of efficiency.

4. Managing Post-Event Cleanup

After a large food truck event, it’s easy to feel exhausted, but cleaning up is crucial for maintaining your equipment and reputation. A messy truck can lead to future issues and possible health code violations.  It is essential not to leave cleanup and restocking tasks for the beginning of the next shift if you want to run a professional operation.

• Delegate Cleanup and Restocking Tasks: Just as you delegated cooking and serving tasks during the event, delegate cleaning and restocking duties to the team. Have specific tasks assigned to different people so that cleaning and restocking is done quickly and efficiently.
• Leave the Area Tidy: Always clean up the area around your truck, including trash bins and food waste. Leaving a clean space is not only essential for compliance with health regulations but also shows respect for the event organizers and your customers.

5. After-Event Reflection and Improvement

After the event is over, take some time to reflect on what went well and what could be improved for future large events. Collect feedback from your team, customers, and event organizers to identify areas where you can improve. Consider conducting a post-event debrief with your team to evaluate the process and discuss improvements for the next event. No two food trucks are the same and general advice will only take you so far.  You must strive to know as much as you can about your own operation in order to see it operate as effectively as possible.  Never assume there is nothing more to learn.

Conclusion

Handling significantly larger-than-normal food truck events requires a combination of preparation, strategy, and flexibility. By ensuring that you have the right inventory, efficient workflows, and a well-organized team, you can successfully manage the pressure of serving large crowds in a short amount of time. The key is to plan ahead, communicate effectively with your team, and maintain a focus on delivering great food and an excellent customer experience. With the right approach, you’ll be able to turn any large event into a resounding success.  You may even be able to begin to take them on more regularly, although in a mobile food setup you will always be limited by physical space constraints.  This is one of many reasons a well thought out menu and kitchen design can make a huge difference for the profitability of your operation. We talk about all of this and more in Food Truck Insight’s course.  Consider signing up today.