Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Business Consultant & Fractional CFO
Target 25 to 35 Percent. Five Points of Drift Is $8,000 a Year.
Owners nod politely at percentages and then do nothing, because percentages do not pay rent. So convert it to money. On a truck doing $13,333 a month, the difference between a 30 percent food cost and a 35 percent food cost is $8,000 a year. Same menu. Same customers. Same hours on the griddle. Eight thousand dollars, gone, because nobody weighed anything.
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Last Updated: 9/6/2026 · Reviewed by Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
The Target
The Range, and Who Lands Where
Food cost percentage is what you spend on ingredients and single use packaging, divided by what you collect at the window. Across the trucks Dr. Paul works with it runs between 15 and 35 percent depending on cuisine. His working target for a profitable truck is 25 to 35 percent, with food and paper in the 25 to 28 percent band for a well run operation.
Lean concepts, 15 to 28 percent
Coffee and specialty beverage run 15 to 22 percent, the best margin on the street, limited by ticket size. Desserts, donuts and ice cream run 20 to 25 percent on cheap inputs and a low ticket. Pizza from a mobile oven runs 22 to 28 percent, where dough is pennies and cheese moves the number. Tacos, burritos and grain bowls run 25 to 30 percent on affordable starches and stretched proteins. Plant based menus look cheap on the invoice and are not, because the prep labor belongs in the plate cost, which is the whole point of costing a vegan menu with prep included.
Mid-tier, 26 to 32 percent
Korean, Pan-Asian and Vietnamese run 26 to 30 percent, where sauce and noodle bases let you balance premium cuts against cheap volume. Burgers and sandwiches run 28 to 32 percent. Beef is volatile, cook times are slower, and you need throughput to make it work.
Premium protein, 28 to 42 percent
BBQ and smoked meats run 28 to 35 percent with extreme shrink over long cooks, so your purchase price and your plate cost are very different numbers. Lobster rolls and seafood run 35 to 42 percent, the highest input cost in the business. Those trucks protect absolute dollars by charging $18 to $32, not by chasing a low percentage.
The Real Split Is Not Cuisine
A truck at 28 percent and a truck bleeding at 40 percent are usually selling similar food.
Disciplined: a tight menu of 6 to 12 items, every protein weighed on a digital scale, recipes standardized, prep lists built off actual sales history.
Drifting: a sprawling menu that complicates inventory and generates waste, portions eyeballed mid-rush by whoever is on the line, protein treated as an unmeasured commodity.
The Method
How to Calculate It Properly
Most owners add up the week's supplier receipts and divide by the week's sales. That is not food cost. That is a purchasing ratio, and it lies to you.
If you spent $3,000 on Monday and $1,500 of it is still in the freezer Sunday night, your food cost was not $3,000. You have to count.
Why weekly, not monthly
Wait for your accountant and you get a profit and loss statement around the 15th of the following month. If food cost ran 39 percent because of a portion leak or a supplier price jump, you find out 45 days after the damage started. Six weeks of profit, already gone.
Weekly counting turns an autopsy into a diagnostic. You catch the leak in seven days, trace it to the item, and fix it before it touches your bank balance. Make it stick by making it boring. Pick a fixed slot, Sunday night after close or Monday morning at the commissary. Count your top 20 high cost, high volume items, which typically represent about 80 percent of your food spend. Write them down. Every week. No exceptions.
The Money
What Five Points Actually Costs
Take the illustrative truck: $13,333 a month in sales, which is the break-even revenue for a truck with a $6,000 fixed base and a 45 percent contribution margin.
It is not a spreadsheet variance. On a full-time truck of the kind Dr. Paul works with, where owner take-home runs about $23,800 a year, $8,000 is a third of your income. Put another way, $8,000 covers your commercial fuel and generator propane for a full year, or most of a year of commissary kitchen rent, or roughly two years of commercial auto and general liability insurance.
You stood at a hot griddle sixty hours a week, drove through traffic, and scrubbed sheet pans at midnight. Then you handed a third of your pay to your suppliers and the trash bin. What the average truck actually earns is covered in how much money a food truck actually makes.
The Four Killers
Why the Number Drifts
In Dr. Paul's consulting work, audits routinely show real world food cost running 6 to 8 points above what the recipe cards say. Four causes, every time.
Eyeballed Portions
The most expensive tool on your truck is not the griddle or the generator, it is the human eye. During a rush with a line six deep, a cook's muscle memory defaults to generous. A heavier scoop of pork. An extra stripe of aioli. Another handful of cheese. To the cook that looks like good service. To you it is a siphon.
Unrecorded Waste
In a restaurant waste sits visibly in a big trash can. In eighty square feet it hides. You prepped 150 portions and served 80, so the other 70 either go past their safety window or get dumped at the commissary. And an untrained prep cook trimming brisket too aggressively throws away edible meat with the fat cap, which spikes your edible portion cost above your invoice cost with nothing in your accounting catching it.
Supplier Price Creep
Wholesale food, paper and fuel move constantly. Avocados jump 30 percent. Cheese goes up forty cents a pound. If you are not auditing invoices and re-costing on a schedule, your menu board stays frozen while your margin quietly goes to zero. Repricing the menu is a quarterly job, not a one time job.
Untracked Staff Meals and Comps
Crews work long shifts in the heat. They eat, and that is fine. But if staff meals, free plates for the security guard, and trades with the truck next door never hit the POS, your math is broken at the source. Every comp is a real cost. Record it as an employee benefit or a promotional expense. Do not ignore it.
The Fix
The Weekly Margin Habit
Plugging these leaks does not require accounting software or a hospitality finance background. It requires a routine on the calendar.
- Sunday night
The physical count
After close, at the commissary, count your top 20 high value items: raw proteins, sliced cheeses, specialty sauces, branded paper goods, cooking oils. Enter them on a standard sheet. Sunday's ending inventory is Monday's beginning inventory.
- Monday morning
Calculate and track the split
Pull the weekly sales report from your POS. Gather the week's supplier invoices. Run COGS and food cost percentage. Record it in a ledger next to your labor percentage. Tracking both together tells you instantly whether a profit dip is an inventory problem or a scheduling problem.
- Two point jump
Execute the trigger protocol
If food cost jumps two or more points against your rolling four week average, do not wait for it to normalize. Run the four checks below.
Audit the Invoices
Compare the last seven days to the prior week. Look for unit price jumps on your top five spend items and for unannounced product substitutions from your distributor.
Audit the Receiving
Verify that what was billed actually arrived. Short deliveries during a hectic commissary drop-off are common and rarely caught.
Theoretical vs. Actual
Multiply your POS sales mix by your recipe card weights. That is what you should have used. Compare it to what you actually used.
Weigh Ten Plates
Pull the scale out during a live rush. Check that the crew is using the right ladles, scoops and portion cups. Muscle memory drifts and it drifts in one direction.
The Arithmetic
The One-Ounce Burger
A BBQ trailer owner in the upper Midwest came to Dr. Paul running brisket, ribs and pulled pork with a promise of extra-large portions. Three of the highest shrink proteins in the business, portioned by hand, and he had never put a scale on the prep counter. He knew what he paid per pound. He had no idea what he served per plate.
Small visual differences do not feel like money. Here is the arithmetic on a single ounce.
One invisible ounce of one ingredient. $4,356. Now add the extra bacon strip, the heavy pour of sauce, and the double handful of fries nobody weighs. That is how a recipe card that says 30 percent turns into a profit and loss statement that says 37 percent.
When Dr. Paul writes a food truck plan, the first item in the smallwares budget is not the fryer. It is a digital portion scale, fifty to a hundred and twenty dollars. Then require the crew to weigh every protein portion for the first seven days, with a laminated portion guide taped to the prep counter showing correct portions, correct scoops and correct ladle fills. Within three days their hands calibrate. They learn what six ounces feels like. After thirty days the scale moves to spot check duty. Most trucks find their worst cost leak in those first three days, before the first bookkeeping cycle ever runs. Skip the scale and you have chosen to run a kitchen where your most expensive ingredient is a freebie.
Do This
Five Steps This Week
Buy a digital portion scale
Fifty to a hundred and twenty dollars. Highest return on investment in the truck.
Count your top 20 items Sunday night
Write it down on a standard sheet, same time every week.
Monday, run COGS and calculate your real percentage
Record it next to your labor percentage in the same ledger.
Compare it to your recipe cards
If the gap is over 3 points, the leak is on the truck, not at the supplier.
Set the same appointment for next Sunday
The habit is the whole strategy. One count proves nothing.
Then check the other half of the equation, whether your prices were ever right to begin with: how to price a food truck menu. And see what your daily number is in what a food truck has to earn each day. Prices that never covered the plate in the first place are one of the quiet reasons a truck runs out of money.
FAQ
Common Questions About Food Truck Food Cost
The four questions Dr. Paul gets most about holding the number.
What is a good food cost percentage for a food truck?
How do you calculate food cost percentage?
Why is my food cost so high?
How much food waste is normal for a food truck?
Want Dr. Paul to audit your food cost with you?
Call or text (321) 948-9588Next Step
Turn the Percentage Into a Number You Manage
A food cost percentage only means something next to everything else on the statement. The Excel financial model puts them together: set your variable cost percentage, your labor, your fixed base, your ticket and your volume, and it builds the break-even analysis, a 12 month profit and loss statement, a 5 year pro forma and a valuation based on cash flow.
Everything on this page sits inside a larger system. Start at the food truck business hub for the whole picture: the industry as it stands today, the eight Organize steps, the business plan and financial model, the five numbers that decide profit, marketing, and when to add the second truck.
Food Truck Business Plan Template
An editable Word plan and an Excel financial model. Set your average ticket, your costs, and your volume, and it builds a 12 month profit and loss statement, a 5 year pro forma, a break-even analysis, and a valuation based on cash flow.
Dr. Paul Directly
Consulting and Business Plan Writing
Dr. Paul writes every plan himself. No hand-offs, no junior staff. Fourteen plus years helping food truck and small business owners turn a busy operation into a profitable one.
The Food Truck Business All-in-One Handbook
The full Organize-Plan-Grow system in book form. The eight steps before you buy anything, the five numbers that decide whether a truck makes money, and the growth decisions that come after.
Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Business Consultant & Fractional CFO | 14+ Years | 1,000+ Clients Served
Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA, business consultant and fractional CFO, is dedicated to making CEOs stronger, sharper, and more effective. He is the founder of Quality Business Plan, creator of Dr. Paul's Organize-Plan-Grow™ Strategy, author of numerous published books on Amazon including The Food Truck Business All-in-One Handbook, and publisher of over 1,000 business-focused videos on YouTube. For over 14 years, he has helped food truck, restaurant, and small business owners turn a busy operation into a profitable one.
Percentages and dollar figures on this page are targets and illustrations used to show the calculation, not projections for your business. The food cost bands, the roughly 6.8 percent net margin and the approximately $23,800 owner take-home are Dr. Paul's working ranges from his own client engagements, not published statistics. Published industry figures are sourced to IBISWorld, "Food Trucks in the US", NAICS-US 722330, July 2025, and are presented to the best of our knowledge based on publicly available information at time of publishing and may change over time. Always verify current details before making business decisions.