
How did mobile kitchens become popular with hipster gourmands? And just how much money can a popular truck make from a lunch shift? Zachary Crocket drops some napkins. This episode was originally published on June 23rd, 2024.
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Zachary Crockett
Mommy. Every Thursday on a busy intersection in
Sarah Lilly
downtown San Francisco, you'll find a bunch
Zachary Crockett
of young professionals waiting in line to buy food out of a truck.
Sarah Lilly
In a financial district that has struggled
Zachary Crockett
to recover in the past few years,
Sarah Lilly
this food truck called Senor Sisig, is
Zachary Crockett
a beacon of economic progress. It distributes $15 burritos with lightning speed as its propane powered generator hums along at maximum power.
Sarah Lilly
Trucks like this are now a common
Zachary Crockett
sight across American cities.
Sarah Lilly
These mobile restaurants sell every kind of food imaginable. Tacos, pizza, fried chicken, vegan grain bowls, barbecue, Thai, Indian, Burmese, even cupcakes. Some of them have devoted fans who
Zachary Crockett
track them on the Internet or seek them out every lunchtime.
Sarah Lilly
The trucks pop up for a couple hours, then disappear, leaving behind nothing more
Zachary Crockett
than an oil stain and a tumbleweed of discarded wrappers.
Sarah Lilly
When did we start getting so much of our food from mobile kitchens?
Zachary Crockett
What's it like to cook in one?
Sarah Lilly
And is a popular food truck a gold mine?
Evan Kadera
I think there's a stereotype. A lot of people would say there's no overhead in food trucks, so you're just rolling in the dough. And that's very far from the truth.
Sarah Lilly
For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is
Zachary Crockett
the economics of everyday things. I'm Zachary Crockett. Today, food trucks Serving food on four wheels is not a new concept.
Matthew Geller
Food trucks go back to the wagon train of people coming west and having to feed people out of one of the stagecoaches.
Zachary Crockett
That's Matthew Geller. He's the founding president of the National Food Truck Association.
Sarah Lilly
It's a trade group that represents mobile
Zachary Crockett
food vendors across the U.S. we had
Matthew Geller
horse drawn tamale carriages in the 1890s in Los Angeles that were going out and servicing areas that just didn't have the food yet because they didn't have the density to have a restaurant. As the years went on, you saw as more and more of the suburban areas were going through, like, big construction booms, Food trucks would go out and feed the construction workers.
Sarah Lilly
Geller says that until around the 2000s,
Zachary Crockett
food trucks had a slightly unsavory reputation. They were often called roach coaches and were perceived as dirty and low quality. That was at least partly a result of prejudice.
Sarah Lilly
Most food trucks at the time were
Zachary Crockett
run by immigrants and catered mostly to manual laborers.
Sarah Lilly
But in the mid-2000s, food trucks found a broader market.
Zachary Crockett
A new generation of operators started buying food trucks and branding them with hip logos.
Sarah Lilly
They used social media to share their
Zachary Crockett
location with fans On a daily basis. Food trucks became trendy.
Matthew Geller
Every food truck line was a community event, People talking about it, enjoying it. And then when we started to get a little momentum, Then there were two food trucks, and then there were three food trucks. All of a sudden, it was like a fun space to hang out for your hour after work or your hour during lunch. And all these people are bouncing into each other like, hey, I'm gonna get the korean tacos from kogi. You go get the burger from baby's badass burgers, and then we'll share. And that really invigorated the industry and grew the industry so fast.
Sarah Lilly
Today, that industry is worth more than $2 billion. It's estimated that there are between 35,000
Zachary Crockett
and 50,000 food trucks in operation all over the country.
Sarah Lilly
They range from unmarked trucks that sell
Zachary Crockett
tacos at construction sites to gourmet operations offering $23 lobster rolls to tech workers.
Sarah Lilly
Starting one of these businesses isn't cheap. You can expect to spend at least
Zachary Crockett
$60,000 for a new, fully outfitted truck. The fanciest costs more than a quarter of a million.
Matthew Geller
When you think about the square footage of a restaurant versus a food truck, I would say per square foot of cooking area, A food truck is definitely more expensive.
Zachary Crockett
And there are ongoing operational costs.
Sarah Lilly
Many food truck operators rent out a
Zachary Crockett
kitchen to prep their food before hitting the road.
Sarah Lilly
In a major city, these so called
Zachary Crockett
commissary kitchens can cost more than $1,000 a month.
Sarah Lilly
Then you have to pay to park your food truck somewhere overnight.
Zachary Crockett
You need gasoline to drive the truck and propane or diesel to run the generator that powers everything inside of it. There's labor, maintenance, Commercial auto insurance, Liability
Sarah Lilly
insurance, and, of course, the food itself.
Matthew Geller
When McDonald's buys beef, they're buying it in A bulk that we could never imagine. When Aramark, Sodexo or Compass, the three largest food service providers are managing a cafeteria in a hospital or an office park, they're buying bulk. When a food truck buys short rib, they're going to go buy £12 for the day.
Sarah Lilly
But starting and running a food truck
Zachary Crockett
is still much cheaper than a brick and mortar restaurant. And the business attracts a certain type of intrepid entrepreneur.
Evan Kadera
My name's Evan Kadera. I'm the CEO and co owner of Senor Sisig.
Zachary Crockett
Kidera was born in San Francisco and grew up in the kitchen at his father's sushi restaurant. He was always interested in the food business.
Sarah Lilly
In 2008, he saw the beginnings of
Zachary Crockett
a burgeoning gourmet food truck scene.
Evan Kadera
I was a rapper at the time and outside of my full time job, I was able to go on tour here and there with some of my friends and to shows. We were doing a show in LA and passed by a food truck and there was a line of 40 people at three in the afternoon, which at that time for me was pretty mind blowing.
Sarah Lilly
Kadera returned to San Francisco and started
Zachary Crockett
brainstorming ideas for a food truck with his friend Gil Paillumo, then a chef at a hotel chain.
Sarah Lilly
The duo came up with a distinctive
Zachary Crockett
concept, a fusion of Filipino and Mexican cuisine.
Sarah Lilly
It's centered around a traditional Filipino dish called sisig.
Evan Kadera
Sisig traditionally is made out of pork's head, using the snout, the ears, the cheeks, and it's marinated soy sauce, vinegar, sugar, very tangy, spicy, sweet, very flavorful. And so we tested that recipe out in a taco.
Sarah Lilly
Once they had the food down, they
Zachary Crockett
started looking for a truck.
Evan Kadera
We spent hours and hours researching food trucks and going to visit every single one that was on Craigslist for a matter of six to nine months. And we found this Chinese food truck that was going out of business that was selling for $30,000.
Zachary Crockett
It took another $25,000 to retrofit the truck with new equipment, paint it and commission a logo. An angry looking pig surrounded by flames.
Sarah Lilly
In total, it was nearly a year
Zachary Crockett
and a half of work before Senior C Sig made its debut at a roller derby in San Francisco. The payoff was worth the wait.
Evan Kadera
Immediately upon opening the windows, there was a line. And that line just went on and on and on and it never stopped until the end of the event. And we sold out of every single thing that we had on the truck. It was that wow moment of, oh, it's real now, we can't Go back today.
Sarah Lilly
Signor Sisig is one of the most
Zachary Crockett
recognizable food truck brands around San Francisco.
Sarah Lilly
The business has three trucks and it
Zachary Crockett
deploys them to various locations across the Bay Area every day. Food trucks have a few ways of making money.
Sarah Lilly
For starters, they can do private events
Zachary Crockett
like weddings, birthday parties and corporate luncheons.
Evan Kadera
That cake can be cut in many different ways. You can charge a flat fee just based on the amount of people that want to be served. It's like we're going to feed all our employees and their families. So that's just more of a buyout. Whereas maybe for a school, they want to just have the food truck there, but they want the attendees to pay. Sometimes we'll set minimums just because we don't know if it's going to be a good event or not.
Sarah Lilly
But private gigs only make up around
Zachary Crockett
20% of senior C SIG's business.
Sarah Lilly
The rest of their revenue has to
Zachary Crockett
be hard won on the streets.
Sarah Lilly
Some food truck operators use data tools
Zachary Crockett
to analyze things like historical foot traffic and neighborhood demographics to try to determine worthwhile intersections. Kadera's process was a bit more trial and error.
Evan Kadera
I would go out to the locations downtown and sit there from 11 to 2 and 1. Do some just visual observation, but I also would have a clicker and would kind of just get a feel of what the flow of traffic was for each individual location.
Sarah Lilly
Finding a good location to set up your truck is perhaps the most important
Zachary Crockett
part of the business, but it can also be a bureaucratic nightmare.
Matthew Geller
So if you're parking next to a building, everybody in that building, you know, 3D vertically, gets a say in whether you get that parking space that's coming up.
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Sarah Lilly
For senior csig. The courtyard outside of the Salesforce tower
Zachary Crockett
in downtown San Francisco is a prime location.
Mariel Edwards
There's always people here. There's always meetings happening here. In the middle of all the Salesforce buildings, the transit center is right there.
Zachary Crockett
That's Mariel Edwards, the operations manager for Senor Sisig.
Sarah Lilly
She says the staff's day begins long
Zachary Crockett
before the customers start lining up. The meats are cooked daily starting at 4 or 5 in the morning.
Sarah Lilly
By 7, the truck staff is in
Zachary Crockett
the commissary kitchen chopping onions, prepping beans, and blending fresh cilantro cream sauce.
Mariel Edwards
They prep the meats, you know, get it all packaged up, and then the truck lead who tased Andrea, she comes in around eight and gets the truck ready to drive off. So make sure the things are loaded. Nothing's gonna fall off. She's got gas, she's got propane.
Sarah Lilly
Orchestrating the operations of a mobile restaurant
Zachary Crockett
comes with some challenges.
Mariel Edwards
We've had a deep fryer fire happened. Yeah. And they actually have to pull the extinguisher and put it out. I was driving to the location one day, and then the suspension just went out and I had to guide the truck off of the freeway.
Zachary Crockett
And in urban centers, parking is always an issue.
Mariel Edwards
Yeah, we still have to pay the meter. And some meter maids are cool about, but some will ticket us. Sometimes I'll just tell a staff it's really not worth you guys stopping what you're doing, you know, like, we'll pay the ticket.
Zachary Crockett
But the biggest hurdle is securing operational permits. On permit applications in San Francisco, you need to identify every location where you want to park.
Mariel Edwards
You can't just apply for a permit in the city and park your truck. There's a lot of things that go into it.
Zachary Crockett
Permit laws vary from city to city,
Sarah Lilly
but in order to operate, a food truck generally needs a business permit, a
Zachary Crockett
health permit, and a fire permit.
Sarah Lilly
Some places require operators to get a
Zachary Crockett
set of permits for every county they operate in.
Sarah Lilly
And in a region like the San Francisco Bay area, where there are a lot of counties close together, permit fees
Zachary Crockett
can run to thousands of dollars per year. Again, senior CCigs owner Evan Cadera.
Evan Kadera
At one time, each food truck can be holding five health permits, five fire permits, and so on and so on and so on. So it gets Pretty ridiculous on the permit fees.
Zachary Crockett
Matthew Geller of the National Food Truck association says these permits are necessary to ensure public safety.
Matthew Geller
You want the build to be safe, as in, you want to make sure that the serving window is out onto the sidewalk and not out on the street. You want to make sure they're cleaning up their trash. You want to make sure they're not blocking sight lines.
Sarah Lilly
But he also sometimes questions who all
Zachary Crockett
of these regulations are serving.
Matthew Geller
The problem that we have in many locations is that people have decided that protecting public health and protecting public safety is secondary to protecting other businesses profits.
Sarah Lilly
Some cities have made it illegal to park a food truck too close to
Zachary Crockett
a brick and mortar restaurant in San Francisco.
Sarah Lilly
Senor Sisig has to be at least
Zachary Crockett
75ft away, and they have to put out a notice to every restaurant in the area before getting a permit approved.
Matthew Geller
Clearly, that is 100% protectionist and has nothing to do with public safety.
Sarah Lilly
Headaches like this have led to an
Zachary Crockett
alternate system for food trucks.
Sarah Lilly
In many cities, dedicated food truck parks have emerged. The park operator takes over the hassle
Zachary Crockett
of finding land and getting permits from the city.
Sarah Lilly
And in exchange, the food trucks pay
Zachary Crockett
a fee, typically a small fixed amount, plus around 10% of their revenue.
Matthew Geller
From an economic standpoint, it's a better choice for them. A lot of times, food truck operators
Zachary Crockett
like Evan Kadera have to walk a fine line when it comes to balancing all of these costs because customers are
Sarah Lilly
only willing to pay so much for
Zachary Crockett
food that comes out of a truck.
Evan Kadera
Yeah, I think there's some price sensitivity there. Some people expect tacos to come out for a dollar out of a food truck.
Sarah Lilly
There's also a limited tolerance for waiting
Zachary Crockett
in line, especially on a workday. Turning a profit depends on quick turnaround.
Sarah Lilly
Senior CCIG staff members are trained to
Zachary Crockett
serve each customer in around one to two minutes.
Mariel Edwards
Where the order starts is with the cashier taking the order, making sure it gets the order correct, passes the ticket over to our expediting window, and here they're communicating to the grill cook what's coming up next. He starts the base of the burrito, then passes it over to the line cook. Whether it's, you know, extra guac, no guac, any special mods. She's also kind of listening to what the expediter is saying. So she knows what's coming up to her line next, verifies it with the grill, and then passes it over to the expediter. One last confirmation from her on what that item is. It's pork, it's shake, whatever it is sticks that label on there and then passes it.
Evan Kadera
It's really just go, go, go. It probably compares to a really, really busy kitchen. But working out of a closet sized space, what we learned is the menu has to be pretty simple so that you can get it out quickly.
Sarah Lilly
Geller says the true masters of this
Zachary Crockett
system are the older food trucks that cater to construction sites and immigrant communities.
Matthew Geller
We call them a route truck. They have the grill top at the back and it's just easier for one person to do all the cooking, one person to be the window person. And a lot of times the route truck doesn't have any branding on it. It will stop for 30 minutes, feed people at a construction site, go to another spot, maybe hit 10 spots for L. Their cuisine is assembled, not made. And their ability to serve a quality product with the speed necessary to hit all the locations is unparalleled. They know how to make money from food.
Zachary Crockett
Kadera has a rough standard for how many orders he wants to sell each shift.
Evan Kadera
Between 100 to 200 would be a pretty good service. We really look for where, you know, hopefully we're doing at least say 30 orders an hour.
Zachary Crockett
But he can't count on hitting that bar every day.
Evan Kadera
If it's raining, you're gonna do probably half of what you would do on a sunny day. So it's very weather dependent day of the week dependent. Is there a conference in town? Is there not? It's really hard to kind of predict what you're gonna sell when you go out. But there is a bottom line threshold of what we know.
Sarah Lilly
On that Thursday afternoon at the Salesforce Tower in San Francisco, the senior SISIG
Zachary Crockett
truck had 177 orders during the three hour lunch shift. That was good for just over $3,100 in revenue. After paying for labor, ingredients, gas, propane, upkeep on the truck, permits from the county, and maybe a parking ticket that might work out to $300 in profit.
Evan Kadera
I think most would try to land anywhere between 10 to 20% margin. 10% is probably pretty standard.
Sarah Lilly
Food trucks are a tough business. Geller says that around 65% of them
Zachary Crockett
shut down within five years. Some never quite figure out the mobile business model.
Sarah Lilly
Others end up using a food truck
Zachary Crockett
as a stepping stone to opening a traditional restaurant.
Matthew Geller
The ones that become really, really successful, a lot of times they go brick and mortar and they leave their truck or they'll keep their truck for a little bit for catering and then they realize they don't want to do it anymore because it's too expensive. Some of them just get tired of it.
Sarah Lilly
Evan Kadera opened the first brick and
Zachary Crockett
mortar Senior SISIG restaurant in 2019. Today he has three stationary locations.
Evan Kadera
We didn't have the capital to start a restaurant in 2010 and we really didn't have the risk tolerance at that point either to sign a 10 year lease on a place that we probably couldn't afford.
Sarah Lilly
Right.
Evan Kadera
And so the food trucks are an entry to a business that you can start to grow your brand.
Sarah Lilly
But Kadera says there's still no feeling like being out on the street feeding a new crowd of people in a
Zachary Crockett
different spot every day. For him, the food truck is a way of life.
Evan Kadera
We're always going to continue to be a food truck business. We're still hungry and we're still humble
Sarah Lilly
for the economics of everyday things.
Zachary Crockett
I'm Zachary Crockett.
Sarah Lilly
This episode was produced by me and
Zachary Crockett
Sarah Lilly and mixed by Jeremy Johnston. We had help from Daniel Moritz Rapson.
Matthew Geller
God, I love food trucks.
Sarah Lilly
The Freakonomics Radio Network the Hidden side
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This episode explores the surprisingly complex world of food trucks in America. Journalist Zachary Crockett investigates how food trucks evolved from humble "roach coaches" with dubious reputations to a trendy, multimillion-dollar industry. Through interviews with industry insiders like Senor Sisig's Evan Kadera and National Food Truck Association president Matthew Geller, the episode digs into the economic realities, operational challenges, evolving regulations, and the sheer hustle of thriving in the food truck business.
Historical Roots ([02:42])
From the 1890s, horse-drawn tamale carriages in Los Angeles served growing populations lacking restaurants.
Up to the 2000s, food trucks had a reputation for poor quality, a view partly shaped by prejudice against immigrant-run vendors ([03:19]).
Transformation in the 2000s ([03:37])
Industry Value and Diversity ([04:30], [04:41])
Startup Costs ([04:51])
Bulk Purchasing Disadvantage ([05:45])
Founder's Story ([06:16])
First Big Event ([08:26])
Multiple Revenue Streams:
Choosing Locations
A Day in the Life ([11:47])
Unique Problems
Regulatory Hurdles
Pricing and Margins
Speed is Critical
Efficient Operations
Old School Masters
High Attrition Rate ([19:05])
Graduating to Restaurants
Never Lose the Love of the Street
On Stereotypes about Food Truck Profits
"[People think] there's no overhead in food trucks, so you're just rolling in the dough. And that's very far from the truth." – Evan Kadera ([02:16])
On Food Truck Community Culture
"Every food truck line was a community event, people talking about it, enjoying it... All of a sudden, it was like a fun space to hang out for your hour after work or your hour during lunch." – Matthew Geller ([03:59])
On Location Bureaucracy
"If you're parking next to a building, everybody in that building, you know, 3D vertically, gets a say in whether you get that parking space that's coming up." – Matthew Geller ([10:24])
On Regulations
“The problem that we have in many locations is that people have decided that protecting public health and protecting public safety is secondary to protecting other businesses profits.” – Matthew Geller ([14:34])
The Love of the Game
"We're always going to continue to be a food truck business. We're still hungry and we're still humble." – Evan Kadera ([20:21])
"God, I love food trucks." – Matthew Geller ([20:50])
The podcast balances a friendly, informative tone with a healthy sense of realism and respect for the hustle behind food trucks. The narration mixes curiosity (“How did food trucks become so big?”) with an appreciation for entrepreneurs working in challenging conditions.