Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Business Consultant & Fractional CFO
Price Off Your Cost. Then Check the Market. In That Order, Every Time.
Most owners do it backwards. They look sideways at the truck parked next to them, see a $10 burrito, and price theirs at $10. That is not competitive analysis, it is inheriting a stranger's cost structure. You cannot see their debt, their supplier terms, or the brother-in-law working the window for free. Cost one plate completely, divide by your target food cost, and you have a floor. Everything above it is strategy. Anything below it is charity.
Or call/text (321) 948-9588. Dr. Paul answers personally.
Last Updated: 9/6/2026 · Reviewed by Dr. Paul Borosky, DBA, MBA
Step One
Cost the Plate Completely
The mistake that buries first year trucks is incomplete costing. Owners add up the protein and the starch, guess at the rest, and call it food cost. The items they leave out are the cheap ones, and the cheap ones go out on every single ticket.
1. Use edible portion weight, not purchase weight
There is a difference between what you buy and what reaches the plate. Buy a pork shoulder at $3.20 a pound. Trim it, smoke it, and lose 35 percent of the weight. Your true cost per pound of servable meat is not $3.20, it is about $4.92. Cost your plates off the purchase price and your real food cost runs three to five points above your spreadsheet. That is your entire margin.
Same thing on the griddle. Ground beef at $4.50 a pound loses about 25 percent cooking. A 5 ounce cooked patty needs 6.67 raw ounces. Your true cost is $6.00 a pound of cooked weight, not $4.50.
2. Count the sub-ingredients
Fryer oil. Seasoning blends. Marinade. The sauce. The pinch of cilantro and diced onion. A street taco might carry $0.72 of marinated pork. Add $0.18 for tortillas, $0.22 for onion, cilantro and pineapple, and $0.08 of salsa, and the raw cost is $1.20. That is 66 percent above the meat alone.
3. Count the packaging as an ingredient
In a restaurant the plate is an asset. It gets washed and used again tomorrow. On a truck the plate leaves with the customer, every time. The boat, the liner, the lid, the wrapper, the sauce cup, the utensil packet, the napkins, the bag. A quality packaging stack adds $0.30 to $0.80 per order.
Miss that on 44 tickets a day and you hand away $13 to $35 daily. Over a 22 day month, that is $290 to $770 of pure profit in someone else's hands.
Step Two
Divide by Your Target Food Cost
Once you have the full variable cost of a plate, the floor is arithmetic.
That $10.00 is a floor, not a recommendation.
Above the floor is a business decision. Charge $11.50 because your service is faster or your product has no local equivalent, and you have built a buffer.
Below the floor is a donation. Sell it at $8.50 because people here will not pay ten dollars, and you are subsidizing lunch out of your own pocket. Volume never rescues a bad margin. It accelerates the damage.
A BBQ trailer owner in the upper Midwest came to Dr. Paul with a menu built on brisket, ribs and pulled pork, and a brand promise of extra-large portions and bang for your buck. Those are the three highest shrink proteins on the street. He was positioning on generosity and pricing off the trucks around him. The menu and the marketing were pulling in opposite directions, and the smoker was eating the difference.
Generosity is a fine strategy. It just has to be priced.
Benchmarks
Target Food Cost by Concept
Different cuisines carry different raw costs and different shrink. Use this as a starting band, not gospel. These ranges are Dr. Paul's consulting targets from his own client engagements, not a published benchmark table. Three of these bands are worked end to end on their own pages: pricing a taco truck menu, building a pizza truck menu, and costing a burger truck menu.
| Concept | Target Food Cost | Typical Ticket |
|---|---|---|
| Coffee and specialty beverage | 15 to 22 percent | $5 to $9 |
| Desserts, ice cream, donuts | 20 to 25 percent | $6 to $10 |
| Pizza, mobile oven | 22 to 28 percent | $14 to $22 |
| Indian and Middle Eastern | 24 to 28 percent | $11 to $16 |
| Tacos and burritos | 25 to 30 percent | $10 to $14 |
| Korean and Pan-Asian | 26 to 30 percent | $12 to $18 |
| Burgers and sandwiches | 28 to 32 percent | $12 to $16 |
| BBQ and smoked meats | 28 to 35 percent | $14 to $22 |
| Lobster rolls and seafood | 35 to 42 percent | $18 to $32 |
Do not hit your target by shrinking portions. A taco truck can force a 20 percent food cost by cutting to two ounces of meat, and it will lose its regulars inside sixty days. The skill is hitting the percentage at a portion that leaves people full. More on holding the number in what food cost percentage a food truck should target.
The Cascade
Watch a Dollar Become a Percentage
Here is why a small price adjustment is not small. Same $2.80 plate, three price points.
A dollar looks like nothing. Now run it across a month at 44 customers a day over 22 service days, which is 968 tickets.
| Price | Monthly Revenue | Monthly Food Cost | Gross Profit | Annual Impact |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $10.00 | $9,680 | $2,710 | $6,970 | Baseline |
| $9.00 | $8,712 | $2,710 | $6,002 | Loss of $11,616 |
| $8.00 | $7,744 | $2,710 | $5,034 | Loss of $23,232 |
Notice What Does Not Move
Your ingredient cost is identical in all three rows.
$2,710 a month. You bought the same food. You did the same work. You just collected less for it. Dropping $2 to match a competitor costs you $1,936 every month, which is the commissary rent, the insurance and the truck payment. A two dollar pricing error turns a working business into a grind that cannot pay its own bills.
Step Three
Now Check the Market
Only after the floor exists do you look outward. This step validates the concept. It does not rewrite the math.
What Not to Compare Against
Never price against a business whose books you have not seen. Not the older truck down the street, not the viral cart on social media, not the diner on the corner. You have no idea whether they are independently wealthy, running on unpaid labor, or about to close because of the exact prices you are copying.
What to Compare Against
The alternatives inside a five minute walk of your window. For an office worker with thirty minutes, your competition is the fast casual chain, the deli case at the convenience store, the vending machine, and the lunch they brought from home. Your price has to feel defensible against those, not against the taco truck.
When you can price above the local market
If your floor lands above the neighbors, you do not have to shrink portions. Customers pay a premium for four things.
A signature item with no local equivalent
A generic cheeseburger is a commodity and gets shopped on price. Wood-fired pizza with local hot honey does not.
Speed
An office worker on a short break values time over two dollars. Hot food out the window in under three minutes while the truck next door runs a twenty minute line is worth a 15 to 20 percent premium.
Visible portion and quality
A heavy, well garnished birria plate with a consomme cup justifies $14 on sight.
The line itself
A clean wrap, professional branding and a well managed queue signal quality before anyone tastes anything.
Step Four
Price the Whole Menu at Once
Costing dishes one at a time causes menu drift. You lose track of how items interact to produce your blended food cost. Sit down and cost the whole board in one session.
The Hero
Target 25 to 28 percent. Your signature item. It is the marketing, and on most trucks it carries the majority of the volume.
- Keep its cost tight
- Standardize the portion and hold it
- Cost this one first, before anything else
The Combo
Target 30 to 32 percent. Hero plus a side plus a drink, bundled. The percentage is slightly worse and the dollars are much better, because it moves the ticket.
- Removes three separate buying decisions
- Speeds the line as a side effect
- See raising your average ticket
The Add-On
Target 12 to 20 percent. House sauces, seasoned fries, chips and salsa, agua frescas. Pennies to make, $3 to $5 to sell.
- Pre-prepped, zero assembly at the window
- This is the tier that pays your salary
Deliberate Subsidy
Priced as a system, you get to choose your trade-offs.
Run the premium brisket taco at 32 percent because it pulls the crowd, and let the 15 percent agua fresca pay for it. That is a decision. The alternative is accidental pricing: a busy weekend, an empty bank account, and no idea why.
When Dr. Paul audits a struggling truck, the first thing he runs is a sales mix cost analysis. Nine times out of ten it is the same finding: the best selling item has the worst margin. If your signature sandwich is 65 percent of your volume and it runs a 38 percent food cost because you are afraid to raise the price, the business is built on a fault line. You are burning out your equipment to generate low margin revenue. Cost your highest volume item first. Get that one to target, by raising the price, adjusting the portion or swapping a component, before you touch the sides. If the thing you sell most is priced wrong, the rest of the menu is noise.
Do This
Five Steps This Week
Pick your top seller and build a full recipe card
Edible portion weights, every sub-ingredient, every piece of packaging.
Divide the total by your target food cost percentage
That is your floor.
Compare the floor to what you charge today
If you are under, you found your leak.
Cost the rest of the board in one sitting
Then check your blended percentage across the whole menu.
Set a calendar reminder to re-cost every quarter
Prices move whether you look or not.
Then connect it to the rest of the numbers: what the truck has to earn each day and how much money a food truck actually makes.
FAQ
Common Questions About Food Truck Menu Pricing
The four questions Dr. Paul gets most about pricing a mobile menu.
How do you price food truck menu items?
What is a good markup for food truck food?
Should I match the prices of other food trucks?
How often should I reprice my menu?
Want Dr. Paul to price your menu with you?
Call or text (321) 948-9588Next Step
Put Every Plate Through the Model
A recipe card tells you what one plate costs. The Excel financial model tells you what your whole menu does to the business: set your average ticket, your variable cost percentage 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.
Ingredient and packaging costs on this page are illustrations used to show the calculation, not quotes for your suppliers. The target food cost bands, the typical ticket bands and the $12 to $16 average ticket range 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.