Test mission accomplished? The above photo was taken at around 15:00 Sunday, after we'd run out of pumpkin and had to reduce our Tres Tacos to Dos Tacos.
In fact we'd run out of more than half the menu by then. Had we made more food, I'm sure we could've sold 4 times as much banana bread, and probably 3 times as much
pindasoep (we should've made this the day before we did make it, stupie). The one "miss" on the menu was this breakfast sandwich idea, which we sold maybe 8 of, and which I'll elaborate on in general in just a second.
Well OK I'll elaborate on it right now actually, in the form of a General Lessons Learned list, some of which are Super Painfully Obvious, but you know, in the frenzy/daze of trying to get the truck open you can easily space on some of the basics, like:
1)
Know how much money you started with. Superstupie, I know. I didn't even consider it frankly. And we had the additional complication of also having a clothing stall, and our opening till was split between that and the truck. We eventually came close to figuring it out: we are pretty sure we did €455 in food sales.
2)
Write down every order and take names. Another one. The duh benefit is knowing exactly how many customers you served at the end of the day, and plus it's a bit more personal when you ask someone their name instead of sticking your big head out the door of the truck and yelling "TWO TACOS, ANYONE?". Someone we only lost one order, our second to last of the day. She came up very sweetly after 15 minutes or so and said "Um, how long does it normally take?" And we're like, "You ordered food?" We'd just been sitting there congratulating ourselves on surviving the day.
But number of customers served? Yeah, we don't know. We were doing well with writing things down until the lunch rush. We know that we sold 10 pieces of banana bread and 20 bucks' worth of pindasoep. And maybe 35 sandwiches. And 30 or 40 orders of tacos. So we think we had at least 80 customers and probably more like 100. Our research had suggested, amazingly enough, that we should expect to be able to serve between 80 and 100 if there was sufficient foot traffic. Zero idea where this research came from, other than probably Googling "average food truck customers per day".
3)
Pricing. I personally think the pricing was right on. It would´ve been nice to ask for an extra euro for the tacos. People would´ve paid it. But a broodje tempeh shouldn´t be more than the 4 euros ours was. Banana bread should probably be a euro per small slice, although it´s pretty gourmet banana bread and could maybe be 2. A little cup of soup for 3 euro also seems right.
4)
Keep a pan for cooking new food. In addition to leaving the pineapple salsa at home, this was my biggest fuckup of the day: when we got to the market the black beans were still frozen. We had two cooking surfaces to work with for the day: 1) one induction burner with two possible pans to use, although nowhere to put the pan you weren't currently cooking with, and 2) a big electric skillet. I used the big skillet to defrost the beans while I set up the steam table, which was totally unnecessary foot-shooting. I could've just defrosted the beans in the table. Instead, I dirtied one of our three pans and since we didn't have running water, it became "the bean pan" all day instead of "the place to cook new food." Stupie.
5)
Fucking squirt bottles. Uggggghhhhcccckkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk. These were terrible. I don't know how much you have to pay to get a squirt bottle with a wide nozzle where the top won't explode off if it gets stuck, but whatever that amount is, it's got to be worth it.
OK, part of the problem was also my design flaw. It started like this: my formative green salsa memory is from
Tortillas in Atlanta back in the 1990s (
another recipe here?). They had a squeeze bottle of green salsa on every table, and if, for example, you were taking a two-hour lunch break from work, you (I) could easily go through most of an entire bottle on your shrimp burrito, it was awesome stuff.
So I've long fantasized about passing the same luxury on anyone else I ever served a taco or burrito to. But jesus, no way, not with these bottles, it would be about 4 minutes before someone's day was ruined by a geyser of fragrant, viscous salsa verde. In the kitchen we had enough mishaps to just switch to little bowls about halfway through service. Which leads me to:
6)
Spoons. Bring lots of spoons.
7)
Don't be afraid to take something off the menu. At some point months ago, we decided that it would be nice to have a savory breakfast sandwich on the menu, since we were going to open around 10:00. I know how it all happened: it was a nice idea, we put a lot of time and effort into it, the components themselves were all delicious....but it just never clicked as a sandwich. Some brilliant person suggested that we should've made it a breakfast burrito, and yes, in hindsight that seems like a much more doable proposition, less bread/dough would better highlight the inner components and a tortilla would also let us leverage our salsa efforts shoot me for using the word leverage but it's accurate. Anyway, my point is: if it's not awesome don't do it.
8)
Estimates. This went pretty well: we went through one "steam table unit" of everything except tempeh, which we did twice as much of. I think we sold 25 broodje tempeh, because we bought 30 buns, and there were something like 5 left at the end, so that was pretty durn good estimating. We'd guessed we might sell 150 tacos, so we bought 200 tortillas just in case, and I think we probably sold 120, not too shabby either.
9)
Surely something else.
