Food trucks becoming upwardly mobileFood trucks becoming upwardly mobile

James Scarpa

In an effort to bring high-end food trucks up to par in technology with brick-and-mortar restaurants, truck consultants and operators are adopting modern digital management tools for their mobile eateries. 


Among the key additions are advanced point-of-sale systems with hardware that has been
ruggedized to withstand the stress of transit, sophisticated global positioning systems for real-time reporting of truck locations, and eye-catching customer-facing video displays. 


Such innovations are aimed at a food-truck sector largely populated by small entrepreneurs with good reasons to embrace technology but little means to afford it. 


“In most cases they are using hand-written tickets,” said Andrew Soulakis, vice president of development for Mobi Munch, a Los Angeles-based company that designs and builds food trucks and consults with truck operators. “More importantly, in a lot of cases they are not even accepting credit cards.”


To make mobile management technology more accessible to truck operators, Mobi Munch recently incorporated the centrally hosted Micros Simphony point-of-sale system into its food-truck technology suite. 


The system provides detailed reporting and business intelligence to operators and enables online credit authorization via the 4G/3G network. Because it is centrally hosted, stored data is never at risk even in the event of hardware failure on the truck. 


“In a mobile environment, we think that is mission critical,” Soulakis said. 


Another key benefit of the system is accurate sales-tax remittance, a matter of concern for municipalities where trucks operate. The Simphony platform can be preloaded with tax information for all jurisdictions that trucks visit. 


“If you’re in Colorado, you would select Boulder versus Broomfield versus Denver,” Soulakis said. “The system dynamically changes the tax rates it is charging to the appropriate rates and segregates that revenue into a bucket specific to that taxing jurisdiction.” 


At the National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show in Chicago recently, Mobi Munch showed off the LudoTruck, one of
Los Angeles’ well-known mobile eateries, equipped with the
Micros Workstation 5 running Micros Simphony, a cash drawer, thermal printer, SunTronic 42-inch high-brightness LCD and DT610 wireless tablet. The LCD displays video, static image marketing and streaming entertainment media. The Micros hardware, also used in demanding environments like cruise ships and trains, is free of moving parts apt to fail, like hard drives and fans, Soulakis said.


The rent for a truck comparable to the LudoTruck at the show begins at $3,000 per month for a 12-month term, Soulakis said, far more affordable than buying the truck for $135,000 or investing in a brick-and-mortar eatery. He declined to specify how much the technology suite costs separately. 


“[What we charge] could be as much as 50-percent less than what it would cost to put a comparable package onto a truck yourself,” he said.


On the streets of Los Angeles, celebrity chefs Mary Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger send their company-owned Border Grill taco truck forth with a POSitouch point-of-sale system. With successful Border Grill restaurants in Los Angeles; Santa Monica, Calif.; and Las Vegas, affording good technology for mobile operations is not a problem for these business partners. 


“It’s not unusual, but not everyone is running that deep a point-of-sale system,” said Peter Barrett, director of information systems and facilities for Border Grill. “They are usually running just cheaper, run-of-the-mill PC-based stuff.”


The system was chosen to enable back-of-the-house integration with company accounting systems, compare the sales performance of the trucks to the restaurants and comply with credit-card regulations, Barrett said. 


“Most people would not spend the amount of money that we would on a POS system,” he said. “They can get something for a few thousand dollars where we would spend $10,000. But we want it to tie in with all of our accounting systems so we are not wasting our dollars having people do a lot of manual entries.” 


RoadStoves, a Los Angeles-based food-truck consulting company that numbers Kogi Korean BBQ-To-Go, Nom Nom Truck and The Grilled Cheese Truck among its clients, is testing a new POS system running on iPads in a few trucks, said co-owner Josh Hiller. In addition to handling sales, it manages inventory and staff scheduling for a price of about $2,500, he said.


“We like to deal with the entrepreneurial young chef who doesn’t have the money to open a real restaurant but has a great food concept,” Hiller said. “Those people can’t be adding an extra $5,000 or $10,000 for hardware and software to their truck.” 


Also spelling opportunity for gourmet food trucks are global positioning systems. They keep followers informed of the truck’s precise whereabouts in real time, supplementing the Twitter feeds that virtually all mobile operators use to stay in touch. 


Hiller said that about 38,000 consumers find his clients’ food trucks with a custom RoadStoves GPS app that works on iPhones, iPads and iPods. A GPS device inside the truck reveals the exact location and also gives the user menu descriptions, Twitter feeds and driving directions.


“It lets the users know any time, in real time, exactly where the truck is,” Hiller said. “When you are running the truck, it’s hard to keep up with your tweets. If there is traffic or if you have to change locations, they know where the truck is.” 


Other advances in technology are on the horizon. 


Mobi Munch is working on a refrigeration temperature logger that monitors and documents food storage temperatures on the truck. 


“If an operator was ever questioned, the system has recorded the data,” Soulakis said. “They can say, ‘I was operating in this time frame, and here are my
refrigeration readings.’” 


Border Grill’s Barrett predicted that closed-circuit TV security cameras might someday become standard on some food trucks.


“If you are an owner-operator who is not on your vehicle all the time, you take the chance of a lot of employee theft,” Barrett said. “You are leaving your business in the hands of hourly employees who might not be above board.”