Using a food truck rental to expand your restaurant business is a great way to offset your slow season and bring in more revenue in general. There are a number of benefits in doing this, but you can only take advantage of them if you do it correctly.

In this article, we’ll explain the best ways to take your restaurant mobile and how you can maximize your success in the event circuit too.

Find Out Where Your Customer Base is Lacking

If your restaurant is located in a major city, think about the most cost-effective way to reach your potential customer base on the other side of town. Opening a second building will cost you a lot of money. However, utilizing a food truck rental will significantly reduce that cost and allow you to set up shop in a number of locations.

To help ensure success, it’s smart to set up in all parts of your city. This will vastly widen your customer base and it may even convince people to drive all the way to your brick-and-mortar restaurant. To ensure people know where you’ll be, there are a few things you should remember to do:

• Regularly post on your website or social media. Because food trucks are constantly on the move, it’s important to let your customers know where you’ll be at all times. Successful food truck businesses will regularly post a schedule on their websites and social media platforms to keep their customers in the know.
• Register for location apps. There are several different food truck locator apps available and it’s helpful to update your information on as many as possible. This way, customers will be able to find you regardless of which app they’re using.
• Physically post information inside your restaurant. If you can, post a physical copy of a schedule somewhere that is easily noticeable inside your brick-and-mortar restaurant. That way, your loyal customers know where you’ll be if they don’t want to go to the actual building.

Food trucks are great because you have the opportunity to cross-promote the truck with your brick-and-mortar restaurant. Renting a food truck will allow you to build your restaurant’s brand and expand in ways you may not have thought initially possible. To ensure success, make sure to be consistent with your branding and logo. Whatever your branding is for your brick-and-mortar place, the same should be mirrored onto your truck. This way, there isn’t any confusion from customers.

Choose a Reputable Rental Company

Shopping around for a reputable food truck rental company can be stressful. To ensure you don’t end up with a flaky company, the best thing you can do is read customer reviews. While these are tricky to find online, you can join your local food truck association group and ask for recommendations. In most cases, these business owners will be extremely helpful in helping you find a good company as well as giving you a heads up on who to stay away from.

MBB Restaurant Consulting

Hiring a restaurant consultant can be extremely beneficial to you, especially if you feel like you have no idea what you’re doing. Here at MBB Management, we can help you grow your business faster without making you compromise the quality of your food.

When you consult with us, we’ll reteach you some basic techniques and we’ll also help you streamline the process. A restaurant consultant will observe how you practice your business before giving you pointers. They’ll shadow your workers to see how they work together and how they interact with your customer base.

Along with that, they’ll also give suggestions on other aspects of your business. Despite their suggestions, MBB consultants won’t force you to compromise your values or stray away from your business plan.

Offer Full-Service Catering

Another great way to utilize a mobile food truck rental is by offering full-service catering. Catering allows you to book private parties and set up shop at a number of businesses and parties. Although catering may sound like a daunting task, having a food truck rental makes it much easier.

For starters, the truck is on-site, so if you happen to need to make more food or have to do other food preparation, you have a designated spot to do so. Food is also made to order at an event. This gives you the option to offer a more flexible menu option. Along with that, you can offer food clean-up, a team of professional staff/bartenders, and a manager for the events.

Don’t Skimp on any Events

Using a food truck rental is the perfect way to break into the event circuit. Although typical walk-up traffic is good, utilizing the event circuit opens up so many more opportunities for your business. Events like farmers’ markets and block parties give you a large potential customer base and you’re guaranteed to get customers here.

Even if you don’t get the business of every single person who attends the event, you still make yourself known to them. Knowing the name of your business is the first step in gaining a new customer. The more events you sign up for, the more likely you are to continuously increase your customer base.

You’ll likely get the most traffic at home and garden shows, farmers markets, car/automotive shows, culinary fairs, and music festivals to name a few.

Use a Food Truck to Promote a Signature Dish

If your brick-and-mortar restaurant has a popular dish that you’re most known for, use your food truck to offer it to people who don’t live near the restaurant. Once they taste the dish and realize how good it tastes, they may feel more inclined to travel to you. Using your food truck to promote your signature dish is the perfect way to make good money.

If customers like a dish and it’s popular in your actual restaurant, that means it’ll likely sell really well in the food truck as well. You could also use a food truck to experiment with your menu a little. However, you should still offer popular items while doing this, just in case the new items don’t do well.