← Food truck event & catering margin calculator
Most food truck pricing advice answers a question nobody can use: what other trucks charge per head. The number that decides whether a booking is worth taking is what this booking costs you — and that figure is larger than it looks, for two reasons a per-head price never mentions.
Open the free quote calculator
The hours the client sees are the hours the truck is actually serving. The hours you and your staff commit are longer:
| Committed time | Minutes |
|---|---|
| Service (the hours the client books) | 240 |
| Commissary prep — portion, pack, and load the menu | 180 |
| Breakdown — clean and load out | 60 |
| Round-trip drive | 40 |
| Total committed per staff member | 520 (8 hours 40 minutes) |
That is 8 hours on site and 8.67 hours committed against 4 hours of visible service. An operator pricing on the service window alone is pricing away more than half the day the booking actually consumes — which is why a fully booked festival weekend can still fail to pay.
A 100-guest Saturday event, two staff at a $22/hour target rate, 30 round-trip miles at $0.67, $4.50 food cost per guest, $25 of propane and generator fuel, a $30 commissary fee, $40 of amortized truck and equipment cost, a $25 special-event permit fee, a 10% peak-day premium on labor and travel, 8% overhead, and a 30% target margin:
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Labor (8.67 committed hours × 2 staff × $22) | $381.33 |
| Mileage (30 × $0.67) | $20.10 |
| Peak-day premium (10% of labor and travel) | $40.14 |
| Food (100 guests × $4.50) | $450.00 |
| Propane & fuel, commissary fee, truck & equipment, permit | $120.00 |
| Direct cost | $1,011.58 |
| Overhead (8%) | $44.93 |
| Total cost — your break-even | $1,056.50 |
| Price at a 30% margin | $1,509.29 |
| Profit | $452.79 |
| Profit per committed hour | $52.24 |
Note the two per-guest figures this produces. The price works out to $15.09 per guest, which is the number that appears on a competitor's flyer. The profit is $52.24 per committed hour, which is the number that tells you whether the Saturday was worth giving up.
The quote above assumes 100 guests. Nothing in it obliges the event to cooperate. Run the same booking at 150 guests — a well-attended wedding rather than a guaranteed corporate headcount — and only the food line moves:
| Line | 100 guests | 150 guests |
|---|---|---|
| Food cost | $450.00 | $675.00 |
| Total cost | $1,056.50 | $1,281.50 |
| Price charged | $1,509.29 | $1,509.29 |
| Profit | $452.79 | $227.79 |
The price never moved and the profit fell by half. This is the structural problem with a flat per-event price built on an expected headcount: the busiest, most successful, most-referred events are the expensive ones to serve, and the quote rewards you the same either way. The calculator flags this as a turnout risk once food cost passes about a third of the price, which is roughly where a normal event-to-event swing starts costing more than the margin can absorb.
There are two honest fixes and one bad habit. Cap the guaranteed guest count, or charge a set rate per guest above it, and the variable cost sits with whoever controls the guest list. Or quote from a realistic high-turnout estimate rather than an average, giving up some quiet-event margin to never be caught out. The bad habit is quoting the optimistic headcount and hoping, because the events most likely to run over are exactly the ones you most wanted to win.
Commissary prep and breakdown time, because it does not feel like the job the client is paying for. Drive time, which is committed labor and not merely fuel — mileage covers the vehicle, not the hour of your life. Truck and equipment amortization, because the truck was bought once and therefore feels free per event, when it is a replacement cost spread over the bookings it will serve. And the one-off special-event permit fee many jurisdictions require on top of the truck's standing license, which a regular route stop never needs.
Price the hours you actually commit, not just the service window. Add commissary prep and breakdown time plus round-trip drive time to your service hours, cost that whole block at what you need to pay staff per hour, then add mileage, food cost for the guest count you expect, propane, the commissary fee, amortized truck and equipment cost, the special-event permit fee, a peak-day premium if it applies, and overhead. Divide the resulting cost by one minus your target margin. In the worked example on this page a 100-guest booking works out to 8 hours 40 minutes of committed time per staff member, costs $1,056.50 all in, and needs a price of $1,509.29 to leave a 30 percent margin.
Because you and your staff are committed to the job well before service starts. Commissary prep to portion and pack the menu, the drive to the venue, and breakdown afterward are all real hours a flat per-head price does not show unless you add them in. In the worked example, 3 hours of prep, 4 hours of service, and 1 hour of breakdown plus a 40-minute round-trip drive add up to 8 hours 40 minutes of committed time against 4 hours of visible service.
A flat per-event quote is built from an expected or guaranteed guest count, but food cost scales with how many people actually get served, and a well-attended wedding or a festival with a longer line can serve far more guests than a corporate lunch headcount. In the worked example, quoting $1,509.29 on an expected 100 guests leaves $452.79 of profit; if turnout runs to 150 guests, food cost rises from $450.00 to $675.00 and the total cost rises to $1,281.50, so the profit at the same quoted price falls to $227.79. The price never moved and the profit dropped by half.
Either works as long as you choose deliberately. Capping the guaranteed count, or charging a set rate per guest above it, keeps the variable cost with the person who controls the guest list. Pricing for the busy case means quoting off a realistic high turnout estimate rather than an average one, which costs some quiet-event margin in exchange for never being caught out. What does not work is quoting off an optimistic headcount and hoping, because the events most likely to run over are the large, well-referred ones you most wanted to win.
Four, in roughly this order. Commissary prep and breakdown time, because it does not feel like the job the client is paying for. Round-trip drive time, which is committed labor and not only fuel. Truck and equipment amortization, because the truck was bought once and so feels free per event, when it is really a replacement cost spread across the bookings it will serve. And the one-off special-event or temporary health permit fee many jurisdictions require on top of the truck's standing license, which a regular route stop never needs.
The calculator takes every figure used above, reports your break-even and target price, shows profit per committed hour, and flags the turnout risk before you send the quote. It runs entirely in your browser.