To Food Truck or to Food trailer?

A question as old as time(more like the advent of the food truck but let’s not nitpick) is whether a food truck is better investment or a food trailer.

Of course, like politics or pizza everyone has their opinion about it and they are usually pretty passionate about it. We do both and don’t discriminate. So let’s give you both sides and you make an educated decision, one that fits your needs and service, seems fair? Alright let’s dive in.

• Prime mover:
  This ones a bit duh, but very significant, in our opinion. A Food truck can drive and park itself almost anywhere while a food trailer needs to be pulled around by a pickup truck or such. If you already own a reliable pickup truck that can pull a trailer, it might not be worth it to pay way more for a truck.
  New step vans can cost a good deal of money and since most foodtruck owners down put in more than 10,000 miles a year preowned is the route most of our customers take. However if you don’t own a pickup truck that can reliably pull a trailer and you need a good sized vehicle for your service consider building a step van into your mobile restaurant.
  A heavy duty pickup truck can cost over 50k today while you can have a used step van for under 30k; however it would raise eyebrows if you were to drop your kids off at school every day in a foodtruck, we of course live for that sort of thing.

• Resupply:
  One of the most important issues that many foodtruck owners face is storage, a vehicle however mighty doesn’t store a lot of supplies, and after around 2.5 hours on an average of brisk business your stores are usually depleted and one has to turn customers away or resupply. Considering you’d still have to pay overheads like labor, parking etc that hurts one’s wallet, significantly. One of our customers, Ted Vong of Shortstop deluxe burgers uses an ice fishing tent to keep supplies nearby (Front range region in Colorado can get windy and ice fishing tents are literally built to stand up against strong winds).
  Unless you have a commissary close by to go and resupply or like Ted an ice fishing tent loaded with supplies, after your supplies run out its time to go home or to the commissary in a Foodtruck; however if you were in a food trailer pulled by a pickup truck, that part of logistics is a lot simpler as one of your employees or yourself can go to the commissary or store to resupply in the pickup truck while service continues.

• Sex appeal:
  Now this is very controversial, but in many cases, a well built Food truck based on a step van will look profesh, maybe a bit more than that a trailer, totally subjective of course.

• Use-able Space:
  There is a reason step vans are so priced and used by UPS to drug traffickers, there is an insane amount of space in and around those things that one can cram generators, water tanks, propane tanks and so much more. All of these are of course totally done in a trailer. However to give one example, we can mount the water tanks under the cavernous space of a step van, to do that in a trailer we’ll need to rob a bit of space on the inside leaving the customer with a little less space for prepping or storage. As with all things in engineering, everything is a trade off.

  No matter which route you decide to take, we at Zion can help make your foodtruck/trailer dreams come true or if you need help making a decision we could help you with that too. Give us a holler!