Welcome back to Business Bites, a bi-weekly column with articles and tidbits we’ve come across in the last two weeks. Facebook Updates Pages: Here’s What Changed Facebook loves to make changes quicker than it takes for an avocado to turn brown. Their most recent target were a staple of food truck marketing—the business Page. Buffer Read more
Mindy Holahan
Business Bites: Start-Up Food, Employee Culture, Video Tips, & Coupon Apps
A quick note before I jump into this week’s articles and links. We recently learned that some of our contact form messages were not making it into our email inboxes. If you emailed us and never received a response, please accept our sincere apologies. We’ve fixed the problem—if you’re still waiting for a response, please Read more
Business Bites: Nifty Napkins, WiFi on the Go, and IFTTT Recipes
Today I’m going to hit you with a couple quick articles, and then I’m going to dig deep into our App of the Week. This week’s app is an intuitive intersection of time-saver and social media powerhouse. Useful Reads At FoodTrucker, we always favor food trucks over the big chain restaurants, but I do love Read more
Business Bites: Better Social Media Tracking, Measuring Customer Happiness, and Loyalty Programs That Work
Welcome back to another Business Bites, our rundown of the most useful business tips we’ve encountered in the past week. App of the Week It takes a lot of Google Docs and Google Sheets to keep FoodTruckr on the road. Google has just released separate apps for each, to improve user experience. If you’re managing Read more
Business Bites: Twitter Tips, Heartbleed, a Must-Read Book, and an Audacious New Coffee Cart
We’ve had a lot of fun exploring food trucks from the fan’s perspective, but it’s time that I play with this column’s menu a bit. We’ve heard from you loudly and clearly—it’s the business advice that you crave. With that in mind, I’m shifting the focus of this column from the fan’s perspective to a Read more
#FoodTruckFan: When Your Favorite Truck Gets Popular
The FoodTruckr team is together in San Diego this week, and a couple of us had an experience that I suspect is common for hard-core fans of food trucks (or any restaurant). We met up with a friend who lives in San Diego, and he took us out for “the authentic San Diego experience, but Read more
#FoodTruckFan: Your Approachability Factor
I had a group of friends over for dinner the other night, and we got on to the topic of ordering pizza. More specifically, The Fear of Ordering Pizza. We had so many arguments my freshman year of college about who had to order the pizza, and the arguments were so involved that they usually Read more
#FoodTruckFan: Selling Extras
A food truck saved my bacon a couple of weeks ago—and it had nothing to do with food. As I’ve mentioned before, I live in Minnesota and we’re currently experiencing the coldest winter of my lifetime (officially, it doesn’t just feel that way). Despite single-digit temperatures, there were still two brave food trucks serving the Read more
#FoodTruckFan: Customer Loyalty Programs
This week’s inspiration comes from an unexpected location: my neighborhood’s 90-year-old candy shop. I was intrigued—and impressed—to see an iPad Mini sitting on the counter. The iPad is part of the Belly program, a customer loyalty card/app/email list program that’s popping up around my metro area. Each time I shop, I scan my the barcode Read more
#FoodTruckFan: Getting Unstuck & Finding Your Next Big Idea
Running a food truck is an inherently creative endeavor, from the crafting of the recipes, to creating a visual brand for the truck, and especially to conjuring money for truck repairs out of thin air. Creativity, as we’ve all experienced from time to time, can be exhausting. We spin our creative wheels, but like a Read more
#FoodTruckFan: How to Sell the Cost of Better Ingredients
On Wednesday in the “How to Start a Food Truck” series, we wrote about the importance of quality ingredients. As a customer, I wholeheartedly second that. I’m sure that as a business owner, you constantly feel the tension of ingredient prices. Do I buy the cheap grocery store-quality tomatoes, or do I buy the fresh-from-the-local Read more
#FoodTruckFan: What Makes Food Trucks So Special?
I’ve been giving this question a lot of thought in the last nine months, since Pat first told us about his plans to start FoodTruckr. What is it, really, that makes food trucks so special? It’s food…from a truck. When you break a food truck down to its components, it doesn’t sound that special. In Read more
#FoodTruckFan: Resolutions
Are you the kind of person who sets resolutions each year? I am, from something as simple as choosing a guiding phrase for the year (2009: “Listen more, talk less”) or as elaborate as building a twelve month happiness project (2014). Whether I ultimately stick to my resolutions or not, I gain a lot of Read more
#FoodTruckFan: Winter Blues No More
Winter is a tough time of year for a food truck fan living in the colder regions of the country. As I mentioned last time, I live in the Twin Cities. Today it’s a balmy 11 degrees, but yesterday dropped down to -8, and all my favorite food trucks have parked themselves for the season Read more
#FoodTruckFan: Guilty Pleasures
What’s your guilty pleasure? Mine’s a grilled cheese sandwich: bread grilled until it’s dark and crunchy, cheese that’s impossibly melty, a bit of melted butter on my fingers. As a child, the grilled cheese sandwich was my mom’s go-to meal when she needed me to just sit still for a few minutes; and now as Read more
Storytelling: Tell Me Your ‘Why’ And I’ll Buy
You have a story to tell me, your customer. Your daily life is vastly more interesting than my monotonous job, which means that I’m eager for a good tale full of adventure, both the ups and the downs. So, the better you get at telling your story, the more connected I’ll feel to you.
And the more connected I feel to you, the more I’ll buy from you.
Three Keys to Building Food Truck Super-Fans
We know quite a few food truck super-fans. To shed light on the loves and habits of such adoring food truck foodies, we polled them about what keeps them going back to their favorite trucks time after time. Their insights may just be the boost of clarity and confidence you need to take your food truck business to the next level.
