Chapter 30 — Further Reading

Grouped by the book's three citation tiers. Tier 1 is material we are confident exists and can stand behind. Tier 2 is real industry practice and benchmarks whose exact citation we have not pinned down — attributed honestly, in ranges. Tier 3 is illustrative and constructed: our own teaching examples.

For this chapter more than most, the authoritative source for anything that matters is local. Every national article, guidebook, and vendor blog about food trucks will give you a permit process that is wrong for your city. Start with your own health department.

TIER 1 — Verified canonical

Your own local authorities. This is the real bibliography for §30.2 and §30.7.

• Your county or city health department's mobile food facility program. Ask specifically for: the mobile-unit plan review packet, the commissary agreement form, the required equipment list (sinks, water and waste tank capacities, refrigeration, hot holding), the inspection schedule, and the fee schedule. Most jurisdictions publish these; many will meet with you before you buy a truck, which is the single highest-return meeting available to a prospective operator.
• Your fire marshal or fire prevention bureau, for hood and fire-suppression certification, propane tank mounting and inspection, and generator requirements.
• Your city clerk or business licensing office, for the mobile vending license itself, proximity and no-vend rules, time limits, metered-space restrictions, permit lotteries, and — critically — whether each surrounding municipality requires its own license.
• Your state revenue department, for the seller's permit and sales-tax registration. Sales tax collected at a truck window is a liability, not revenue (Chapter 31).

Food safety and labor frameworks — unchanged by format.

• The FDA Food Code. The framework for time and temperature control, cold holding at or below 41°F, hot holding at or above 135°F, cooking temperatures, cooling, cross-contamination, warewashing, and sanitizer concentration. States and localities adopt versions of it; find out which version yours has adopted. This is the substance behind every claim in Chapter 25 and every food-safety statement in this chapter.
• HACCP as a hazard-analysis framework, which applies to a mobile or delivery-only operation exactly as it applies to a restaurant — and is arguably more useful in a format with less refrigeration and no backup.
• ServSafe and equivalent food-handler and certified-food-protection-manager programs. Requirements vary; a certified manager is commonly required and food-handler cards commonly required for crew.
• The Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) — minimum wage, overtime, and recordkeeping. Note that a small crew does not reduce the obligations, and that a residency's casual tip arrangements are exactly where wage-and-hour exposure is created (Chapter 20).
• The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Relevant to a host restaurant's premises during a pop-up, to service-window accessibility considerations, and to online ordering (Chapter 8).

Financing and business structure.

• The SBA 7(a) and 504 loan programs, and the SBA's own published program descriptions and local district office resources. Note for small-format operators that vehicle-and-equipment financing is frequently a different product from a restaurant term loan; ask.
• Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs) and SCORE, which are widely available at no cost and are genuinely useful for a first small-format budget.

Institutions and public record.

• The National Restaurant Association and the Bureau of Labor Statistics as institutions, for industry-level context on employment, off-premise sales, and operating conditions. Use their published material; do not let a secondary source put precise figures in their mouths.
• The COVID-19 dining-room closures beginning in March 2020 and the shift of restaurant sales to off-premise channels — public record, and the setting for Case Study 2.
• The delivery-commission-cap ordinances several U.S. cities adopted during the emergency period. Look up your own city's, whether it expired, and what it capped.
• LMP Services, Inc. v. City of Chicago — the challenge to Chicago's 2012 mobile-food ordinance, including its 200-foot proximity rule and location-tracking requirement, upheld by the Illinois Supreme Court in 2019. Read it if you operate in Illinois; read about it anywhere else, as the clearest available illustration of how a proximity rule reshapes a truck's revenue model. Verify the current state of the ordinance before relying on anything here.

Books already in this volume's reference structure.

• Roger Fields, Restaurant Success by the Numbers. The clearest available treatment of restaurant arithmetic for an owner-operator. Read its start-up cost and break-even material against §30.1's capital-versus-ceiling comparison.
• Danny Meyer, Setting the Table. For §30.3's Hospitality callout. Meyer's argument about what hospitality is applies to a forty-second window transaction more than most people expect, and applies to a delivery-only format almost not at all — which is itself the diagnosis.
• Brown and Rowe, The Restaurant Manager's Handbook. Broad operational reference; use its purchasing, receiving, and food-safety sections, which transfer directly to a commissary operation.

TIER 2 — Attributed, specifics unverified

Treat everything in this tier as orientation. Where a range is given, it is a range because the honest answer is a range.

• Food truck acquisition costs. Industry guidance and the used-vehicle market generally put a serviceable used truck with an existing kitchen somewhere in the tens of thousands, and a new custom build well into six figures — commonly cited in the \$150,000–\$250,000+ band. Verify with actual quotes from at least two builders and at least three used listings in your region. The chapter's \$78,000 used-truck figure is illustrative.
• Commissary kitchen rates. Widely variable; monthly arrangements in the low hundreds to low thousands of dollars are all common depending on market, access hours, and storage. Get three quotes and visit all three at a busy hour.
• Shared-kitchen and incubator rates. Hourly access commonly quoted in a band around \$18–\$45/hour, with monthly blocks and separate dry and cold storage fees. Ask what "prime time" costs and whether it is available at all.
• Festival and event vendor fees. Both flat space fees and percentage-of-gross structures are standard; percentage arrangements commonly fall somewhere in the 15%–25% range. Both figures vary by event size and reputation. Always ask about weather policy before signing, and expect non-refundability.
• Ghost-kitchen license fees. Real agreements are negotiated and not published. Facility fees in the low thousands per month for a small suite are commonly described, sometimes with a percentage-of- sales component and always with utilities and pass-throughs on top. Get a term sheet; the structure matters more than the headline number, and the assignment and early-termination clauses matter most of all (Case Study 2).
• Third-party delivery commissions. Chapter 28's territory. Generally described in the 15%–30% band depending on the service tier and marketplace, with additional optional-in-theory advertising spend on top. First-party ordering costs payment processing rather than commission.
• Prime-cost and food-cost benchmarks by format. Full-service guidance generally puts prime cost at or below 60% and food cost in the high twenties to low thirties. Small formats with narrow, cross-utilized menus frequently run food cost tighter and labor lower — which is why the illustrative truck's 57.6% prime cost is plausible rather than optimistic.
• Restaurant failure rates. See Chapter 1. The peer-reviewed work most often cited (H.G. Parsa and colleagues, published through Cornell) found first-year failure closer to one in four with cumulative failure approaching six in ten by year three — not the 90% of folklore, and note that "failure" in that literature generally means closed or changed ownership. There is no reliable equivalent published figure for food trucks specifically; be skeptical of anyone who quotes one.
• The ghost-kitchen sector's expansion and contraction. Trade press covered both phases extensively. Read the coverage for the structure of the argument — single-channel dependency, two landlords, platform-controlled growth — and be suspicious of any article that supplies precise unit counts or operator financials.
• Food truck trade associations and state-level mobile-food advocacy groups. Often the fastest route to accurate local permit information and to other operators who have already fought your fight. The person washing pans next to you in a shared kitchen is a better source than most published guides.

TIER 3 — Illustrative / constructed

Everything in this category was built for teaching and is labeled as such wherever it appears. None of it is a real business's records.

• Bellwether — the book's running project. A constructed 68-seat neighborhood American restaurant: \$620,000 project cost, \$95,200 annual occupancy on a ten-year lease with a personal guarantee, \$1,550,000 year-one revenue, 60.0% target prime cost, 31 people, \$38,070 of annual turnover cost, and \$1,367,600 of personal exposure before insurance. Every comparison in this chapter is drawn against it.
• Figure 30.1 — capital, ceiling, and exposure across five formats. Ranges illustrative; bars scaled within each column against the Bellwether row.
• Figure 30.2 — the illustrative truck's annual P&L: \$477,700 of revenue, 57.6% prime cost, \$75,939 of operating profit, \$52,467 net after \$23,472 of debt service, built from a \$140,000 project budget and a \$50,000 / \$90,000 capital stack.
• Figure 30.3 — where a truck's dollar goes, against Bellwether's: the 13.8% "mobility cost" compared with 6.1% occupancy.
• Figure 30.4 — contribution per crew hour across five channels: private gig \$69.57, brewery evening \$45.64, large festival \$31.05, lunch route \$29.89, small festival \$26.98.
• Figure 30.5 — the illustrative ghost kitchen's year: \$346,800 of revenue, 57.0% prime cost, a \$14,271 operating loss, and the 32.3% commission-plus-facility block that produced it.
• Figure 30.6 — what a truck teaches and what it does not.
• The residency worked example (§30.4) — 62 covers, a \$38 prix fixe, a 30%/70% food split with the host keeping beverage: \$419 of guest contribution and \$964 of host contribution on a dark Monday.
• The rain year (§30.2) — a 16.1% revenue decline producing a 43.9% decline in net.
• The Business Plan checkpoint — the deferred truck extension at \$110,000, the delivery-only second brand at \$39,241 of annual contribution, and the ten-night residency test with a \$430 downside.
• Case Study 2, Part Two — a labeled composite operator: three virtual brands out of her own kitchen contributing \$34,773, a licensed suite across town bleeding \$80,470, and a \$43,482 saving from closing fourteen months early.