How to build a food truck directory that tells people where lunch is parked today.

A food truck moves, and that is exactly why people need a directory for it.

A restaurant has an address. A food truck has a route, a home lot on Tuesdays, a brewery on Friday nights and a festival twice a summer. The hungry person standing on a corner at noon does not care about any of that. They want to know which trucks are within walking distance right now and whether one of them does vegan tacos.

General review sites list a truck once, often with the address of the commissary kitchen where it parks overnight. Map apps show the same stale pin. The truck's own social media feed is current, but you have to already know the truck to follow it.

Who searches a food truck directory

• Office workers and students looking for lunch near them on a weekday.
• People planning an evening at a brewery, winery or park who want to know which truck will be there.
• Event planners: wedding couples, office managers, school PTAs and HOA boards who want to hire a truck for a party.
• Property managers and breweries looking for trucks to book for their lot.

Pick the angle

Start with one metro area, or one city and its suburbs. A national food truck directory is a list of names with no schedules. A city one, kept current, becomes the answer to "what is out there today". Some founders go narrower still: trucks at breweries in one county, or catering trucks for weddings in one region.

The whole value is freshness. A food truck page with last month's schedule is worse than no page at all.

Catering leads pay best, because one booked wedding is worth a week of lunches.

Most food truck owners run on thin margins and will not pay to be listed until the directory has sent them customers. So list every truck free, and charge for the things that bring them work they can measure.

The strongest product is the catering request. A couple planning a backyard wedding, or an office planning a summer party, fills in a short form with date, guest count, location and cuisine, and the request goes to the trucks that fit. A truck that books one private event from your site will understand the value straight away.

The second product is visibility on busy days: a featured spot at the top of a cuisine or neighborhood page, or on the "this weekend" pages people check before going out. Breweries, commissary kitchens, truck builders, wrap shops and event venues are natural banner buyers, since their customers are the trucks or the crowds.

Do not charge trucks to appear. Charge them to be seen first, and to get the event inquiries.

Launch in early spring, with one brewery strip and one lunch district.

Food truck traffic follows the weather. In most places the season builds in spring, peaks in summer and thins out after the fall festivals, so open the site while owners are planning their season and still have time to talk.

First area

Pick one lunch district and one cluster of breweries in the same city. Get every truck that serves them on the site with current stops before you promote anything. A visitor who finds three accurate trucks will come back; one who finds thirty stale ones will not.

Partners

• Breweries and taprooms: offer to publish their truck lineup for free, in exchange for a link and a sign at the bar.
• Rally organizers: host the official lineup page for their event.
• Commissary kitchens: ask the manager to tell their trucks about the site.
• Office building managers who want to bring trucks in for staff.

Checklist

1. Cuisine categories and the fields above set up.
2. Trucks imported, cleaned and checked against current social media posts.
3. Fifty owners asked to claim, with a printed card handed over at the window.
4. Catering request form tested with a real planner.
5. Weekend page published every Thursday.
6. A weekly reminder to owners to update their stops.

A worked example: Curb and Kettle, a truck directory for Minneapolis and St. Paul.

Picture Curb and Kettle, a made-up food truck directory for Minneapolis and St. Paul. Its founder ran a coffee trailer for three summers and kept getting the same message from friends: who is parked at the brewery tonight? She started the site to answer that question for the whole metro, beginning with the downtown lunch blocks and one brewery district she already knew well.

Categories

• Eat today
  • Tacos and Latin
  • Barbecue and grill
  • Asian
  • Sweets and coffee
• Hire a truck
  • Weddings and parties
  • Office and campus events
• Where trucks park
  • Breweries and taprooms
  • Office plazas and hospitals

Who it serves

Weekday lunch crowds downtown and around the university, families heading to taprooms on Friday evenings, and people planning a graduation party or a backyard wedding. The third group is the smallest, yet it brings almost all of the revenue, because a party needs a truck for a whole evening.

How it started

In February she pulled together truck names from public permit records, three brewery lineups and the vendor page of a June rally, then cleaned the import by hand, deleting every pin that pointed at a commissary. In March she visited shared kitchens with a stack of printed cards, since that is where owners prep and repair their trucks in the cold months. She also asked each brewery manager for the coming month's lineup, which gave the site its first pages that changed every week. By the first warm weekend, 64 trucks had claimed their pages and 41 were keeping their weekly stops current.

How it makes money

Catering requests came first. A planner enters the date, guest count, address and cuisine, and the request goes to the trucks willing to travel that far. Trucks paid nothing to receive requests in the first season. In the second, a yearly membership gave priority on requests and a verified badge. Two breweries bought banner spaces on their own lineup pages for the summer, and a truck builder sponsored the winter page listing trucks that keep serving from heated lots.

The paying customer is rarely the hungry person at noon. It is the planner, the truck owner and the business that wants to reach either of them.

Every truck in this table is invented for the example.

The first 90 days: from an empty site to trucks updating their own stops.

Count the 90 days back from the first warm weekend in your city. In most of the northern US that means starting in February, while owners are planning their season and their trucks are still parked at the commissary. In warm places where trucks serve all year, pick a quiet month, such as the slow weeks after the holidays.

The plan below puts the hard part, getting owners to claim and update, in the middle, after the site already looks complete enough to impress them. It ends with real catering requests, because those decide whether trucks see the site as worth their time. Keep a simple log of every owner you speak to, with the date and what they agreed to, because you will follow up with most of them twice. Do not move to the next block until the "done when" line is true. A directory that launches with half the trucks claimed but every schedule accurate does better than one with every truck listed and stale stops.

Three ways to build it, and what a truck directory needs from each.

A food truck directory has one hard requirement and several easy ones. The hard one: an owner must be able to change this week's stops from a phone in under a minute, standing in a parking lot, or the site goes stale by June. The easy ones are cuisine pages, a map of regular stops, reviews and a form that sends event requests to trucks.

Building it with developers makes sense if you want something standard tools do not do, such as live location from a tracker in each truck. Expect months of work and an ongoing bill for fixes, and remember that a live map is only as good as the number of owners who switch the tracker on each morning.

Installing a directory script or WordPress directory plugin on your own server gives you control of the code and a wide choice of themes. You take on hosting, updates, backups and spam, and you often need several add-ons for claims, reviews, maps and lead forms that must keep working together after every update.

A hosted builder such as Yclas gives you claimed pages, reviews, maps and quote requests sent to businesses without running a server, so your hours go to rallies and commissaries. The trade-off is working within what the platform offers rather than designing every feature yourself.

Choose the route that lets you spend your first summer at the truck windows, not fixing a server.

What a food truck directory costs to run.

The software is the smallest part of the bill. Most of the cost is your time in the first months: finding the first listings, answering questions and checking what gets posted.

Expect to spend on Google Places API usage when you import trucks, printed cards to hand out at rallies, and perhaps a small booth fee at a food truck festival. Some organizers charge for a sponsor or vendor table even when you are not selling food.

Mistakes that leave a food truck directory empty by August.

• Launching in November. Owners are winding down and lots are empty, so the first visitors find nothing serving. Do the building in the cold months and open to the public with the first warm weekend.
• Pinning trucks to their commissary. Imports often place a truck at the shared kitchen where it parks overnight, usually in an industrial area nobody eats in. Delete those pins and lead with the regular stops instead. A visitor who drives to a warehouse lot at lunchtime will not trust the site again.
• Typing every schedule yourself. If you copy each truck's week from its social posts, you become the bottleneck, and the first week you are sick the site goes stale. Get owners to claim and update, and only fill gaps on the brewery lineup pages, where one manager can confirm a whole week of trucks in a single message.
• Covering the whole state on day one. Two hundred trucks spread across ten cities leaves no single city with enough to be useful. Finish one metro, then add the next, and only once owners there update their own pages without being chased.
• Treating every truck as a lunch truck. Some trucks only cater and never park in public. Give them their own category, so planners find them and lunch seekers do not walk to a truck that is not serving. A catering-only truck can still have reviews from past events, which planners read closely.
• Burying the catering request. It is your main product, yet many sites hide it behind a contact link. Put a clear "hire this truck" button on every truck page and every cuisine page, and ask for guest count and date up front so trucks can answer in one reply.
• Charging before the first summer. Owners talk to each other at every rally, and a fee charged before any results earns a bad name quickly. Prove the requests first, then sell priority and featured spots, and show each paying truck how many requests and page views it received.
• Ignoring the breweries. Taprooms without kitchens need a truck most nights, and their regulars want the lineup. A brewery that shares your lineup page sends you both eaters and trucks, and the lineup page tends to become one of the most visited pages on the site by midsummer.
• Forgetting the weather. One storm cancels half the stops on the page. Ask owners to post cancellations at the top of their stops field, and say on every truck page that plans can change at short notice. Owners who post a cancellation quickly should be thanked, not marked down.

Food truck terms a directory founder should know.

These are the words you will hear from truck owners, event planners and city permit offices.