Price each dish so its food cost fits what a service day can afford. Add the day's fixed costs (pitch, fuel, wages, insurance, the truck) to food cost, divide by what each dollar keeps after card fees, the pitch percentage and your margin, and you have the takings needed. In the market below, that capped food cost at about 26%.
Most pricing advice stops at the plate: ingredients plus a markup. It skips the costs that arrive whether or not anyone buys, which is why a bun at 33% food cost can still lose money on a wet Saturday while a cheap side quietly pays for it.
A Saturday market that took $989.50 and kept $55.55
Picture a two-person truck at a weekly Saturday market. Every figure in this piece is illustrative; the method is what carries over. The menu has six items, a normal Saturday sells 115 portions, and the owner has always priced by feel, assuming that with food cost around 28% most of each sale is profit. Here is where one normal Saturday's money goes.
| Line | Amount | Share of takings |
|---|---|---|
| Takings (115 portions) | $989.50 | 100% |
| Food and packaging, with a 5% waste allowance | $275.84 | 27.9% |
| Card fees | $31.64 | 3.2% |
| Pitch fee, the part charged as 7% of takings | $69.27 | 7.0% |
| Fixed costs for the day (next section) | $557.20 | 56.3% |
| Left after paying the owner a wage | $55.55 | 5.6% |
Food cost is the one line the usual guides price against, and here it is only just over a quarter of takings. The owner's wage already sits inside the fixed costs, so the $55.55 is what remains after everyone, including the owner, has been paid for the day. That is thin. A Saturday where portions fall by a tenth already loses money.
| Item | Price now | Cost per portion (with 5% waste) | Food cost | Portions on a normal Saturday |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pulled pork bun | $11.00 | $3.62 | 33% | 29 |
| Falafel wrap | $10.00 | $2.42 | 24% | 21 |
| Loaded fries | $8.00 | $2.42 | 30% | 18 |
| Chicken rice bowl | $12.00 | $3.26 | 27% | 17 |
| Fries | $4.00 | $0.79 | 20% | 15 |
| Lemonade | $3.50 | $0.63 | 18% | 15 |
Customers buy about 1.5 items per sale in this example, and 85% of sales go through the card reader while the rest is cash. Both figures come from the till report, not from guesswork, and you should pull yours the same way. Portion costs are shown rounded to the cent; the sums use the unrounded figures, so a hand total of the food line comes out 24 cents above the $275.84 used here.
Overhead per service day: six lines and a total
A service day is everything between loading the truck and locking it up again. Its overhead is the money that leaves whether you sell 60 portions or 160. For this truck it comes to six lines.
| Line | How it is worked out | Per day |
|---|---|---|
| Pitch, flat part | The organiser's fixed fee, separate from the 7% of takings | $60.00 |
| Fuel to the site and back | 38 miles at 40 cents a mile (fuel receipts divided by logged miles) | $15.20 |
| Generator fuel and propane | A month of receipts divided by service days | $22.00 |
| Wages | Owner 10 hours at $20 (prep share, loading, trading, clean-down), helper 7 hours at $15 | $305.00 |
| Prep kitchen share | $360 a month divided by 8 service days | $45.00 |
| Yearly costs spread out | $10,450 divided by 95 service days | $110.00 |
| Total | $557.20 |
The yearly pot is insurance $2,350, permits and licences $600, truck repayments $4,800, servicing and repairs $1,800, and the till subscription plus accounting $900. Dividing by the number of days you actually trade matters: a truck that works 95 days carries each day's share, but the same truck working 60 days carries nearly 60% more per day.
The lines owners most often leave out are their own wage, the prep and clean-down hours either side of trading, repairs, and the fixed part of the card fee. Any tax you collect at the till is also absent from these sums. If you do add tax at the till, check whether your processor and the organiser charge their percentages on the tax-inclusive amount, because that would nudge both a little higher.
An assistant is good at the dull part of this, which is sorting three months of receipts into the right pots. A prompt to start from:
I run a food truck and want the cost of one service day. I'll paste three months of
receipts, bank lines and mileage notes. Do this in order:
1. Sort every line into: fixed per service day, yearly (to spread over my service days),
or varies with sales.
2. List anything you would expect to see and can't find (my own wages, prep time,
cleaning, repairs, disposables, parking, float).
3. Show the totals in a table with the working, then the cost of one service day.
Mark any figure that is a guess as GUESS. Don't round until the last line.
Service days in this period: 24. Data: [paste]A typical reply (illustrative) asks whether the $412 repair bill in March should be treated as a one-off or a yearly cost, notices that no wages are listed for the owner, and files $186 of gloves, cleaning spray and bin bags under "varies with sales". Two fixes are needed. The repair bill belongs in the yearly pot, so use the average of the last two years of invoices instead of one bad month. And the gloves and bags, which track portions rather than days, are better folded into packaging cost per portion than left in overhead.
For the full routine of turning invoices into recipe costs, costing a food truck's dishes with ChatGPT before buying software goes through it step by step.
Cost per portion: yield, packaging and the waste nobody weighs
Take the pulled pork bun. The pork is bought raw at $7.50 a kilo, and a bun needs 140 g of cooked meat. From the owner's own batch records, cooked pork weighs about half what it did raw, so a bun needs 280 g raw: 0.28 kg at $7.50 is $2.10. Add the bun $0.55, slaw $0.35, sauce $0.20 and the box and napkin $0.25 for $3.45. Add a 5% allowance for dropped, overcooked and tasted portions and the cost per portion is $3.62.
The 5% is a placeholder. To replace it with a measured figure, count what you cook and what you sell over three trading days. The gap, divided by what you cooked, is your real waste rate.
Photographing supplier invoices and asking an assistant to turn them into a cost table is a good use of the free plans, as long as you check its units. Here is what a mistake looks like in practice (illustrative). Asked for the cost of pork per bun, the assistant divided $7.50 a kilo by the 140 g of cooked weight rather than the 280 g of raw weight, and returned $1.05. The bun's food cost dropped from 33% to 23%, which looked wonderful and was wrong by exactly the cooking loss. The giveaway was that the pork line no longer matched the batch records. The fix is a standing instruction: "show the weight you used on every line, and say whether it is raw or cooked."
Card fees: why a $4 portion of fries costs 6% to sell
Square's fees page lists 2.6% plus 15 cents for a tap, dip or swipe on its Free plan, and 2.5% or 2.4% plus 15 cents on its paid Plus and Premium plans (see Square's published fees); other processors differ, so use the rate on your own statement. The percentage scales with the sale, but the 15 cents does not, which is what hurts small tickets.
| Card sale | Fee (2.6% + 15 cents) | Fee as a share of the sale |
|---|---|---|
| $4.00 (fries only) | $0.25 | 6.4% |
| $8.00 (loaded fries) | $0.36 | 4.5% |
| $12.91 (this truck's average) | $0.49 | 3.8% |
| $25.00 (two meals and drinks) | $0.80 | 3.2% |
In the Saturday example 85% of sales are by card, which makes the percentage part 2.21% of all takings, plus $9.78 a day in fixed 15-cent fees across about 65 card sales. Together that is the $31.64 in the first table. To find your own effective rate, divide a month's total card fees by a month's card sales. This truck's comes to 3.8%, well above the 2.6% on the rate card.
The practical lever is the size of the ticket, not the processor. A fries-only card sale pays the full 15-cent fixed fee on a $4 purchase, while the same fries added to a $13 meal add only the 10-cent percentage. If your till report shows many single-item card sales, a meal deal that folds the side into the price removes a whole fee. For the till side of this, including offline mode and what the AI features cost, see food truck POS fees, offline mode and the AI features worth paying for.
Pitch fees: flat money is overhead, a percentage taxes your prices
Organisers charge in different ways: a flat fee, a percentage of takings, or a flat fee plus a percentage. The two parts behave differently in the sums. A flat fee is overhead, so it belongs in the day's fixed costs. A percentage moves with every sale, which means raising prices raises the fee too.
A quick sum shows the effect. With a 7% pitch fee and the 2.21% average card cost, only 90.79 cents of each dollar reaches your cost sheet. To keep $11.00 from a bun, you need to charge about $12.12, not the $11.00 plus 9.21% you might be tempted to add ($12.01). That is why the pitch percentage is handled as a deduction in the next section rather than as another cost per dish.
Ask each organiser three things before you price for an event: whether the fee is flat, a percentage or both; whether a percentage applies to gross takings or to sales after tax; and when it falls due. For a festival the terms usually sit in the vendor pack, and drafting festival applications with AI shows how to pull them into a one-page summary before you apply.
What the day can afford: solving for food-cost percentage
Now the sum that ties it together, using a 12% margin target after the owner's wage. Four steps.
- Start from 100% of a sale. Take off the pitch percentage (7%), the average card percentage (2.21%) and the margin target (12%). That leaves 78.79% of takings to pay for food and the fixed costs.
- Add up the amounts that do not scale with price: food and packaging $275.84, the fixed card fees $9.78, and fixed day costs $557.20. The total is $842.82.
- Takings needed = $842.82 divided by 0.7879 = $1,069.70. This Saturday took $989.50, so prices need to yield about 8% more at the same volume.
- Affordable food cost = $275.84 divided by $1,069.70 = 25.8%. That is the ceiling for the whole menu, not each dish, and it is lower than the 27.9% the owner has now.
With that ceiling, each dish has a price at which its food cost would sit at 25.8%. Whether the market will pay it is a separate question, and it is one the owner has to answer from experience of the customers and the stalls nearby.
| Item | Price now | Price at 25.8% food cost | New board | New food cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pulled pork bun | $11.00 | $14.04 | $12.50 | 29% |
| Falafel wrap | $10.00 | $9.36 | $10.00 | 24% |
| Loaded fries | $8.00 | $9.36 | $9.00 | 27% |
| Chicken rice bowl | $12.00 | $12.62 | $12.50 | 26% |
| Fries | $4.00 | $3.05 | $4.50 | 18% |
| Lemonade | $3.50 | $2.44 | $4.00 | 16% |
The bun is the problem dish, and $14.04 would put it out of reach, so the owner settles on $12.50 and recovers the rest elsewhere: loaded fries up a dollar, the bowl up 50 cents, and the two cheap items, which already sit well under the ceiling, up 50 cents each. The falafel wrap stays at $10. On the same 115 portions, takings become $1,074.50, just above the $1,069.70 needed.
The new board against the old one, with volume risk
A price rise only helps if people still buy. The honest test is to assume they do not all stay. Here is the day's profit under both boards if every item sells a bit less, with the pitch fee and card fees recalculated on the new takings each time.
| Portions sold | Old prices | New prices |
|---|---|---|
| 115 (normal Saturday) | $55.55 | $132.72 (12.4%) |
| About 109 (5% fewer) | $24.93 | $98.24 (9.6%) |
| About 104 (10% fewer) | -$5.72 | $63.74 (6.6%) |
| 92 (20% fewer, a wet day) | -$66.99 | -$5.26 |
The new board beats the old one unless portions fall by more than about 11%. If you can't tolerate that risk, test it dish by dish rather than moving everything on the same Saturday; testing a menu price increase one dish at a time lays out how to read the result without fooling yourself.
The portion count that pays for the day
Break-even is the number of portions at which the day makes nothing. On the old prices it is about 105 portions, or $900 on the till. On the new prices it is about 93 portions, or $868. The day's overhead per portion makes the same point from another angle: $4.85 at 115 portions, but $6.06 at 92. Fixed costs don't shrink when the queue does.
Write the break-even count on a card inside the hatch. If you are on pace for fewer than 93 portions by the time the lunch rush is over, you still have levers: send the helper home early, stop prepping the slowest item, trim the menu for the last two hours. None of that is possible on a day when you did not know the number.
What-if prompts: a dearer pitch, a pork rise, more card sales
Once the sheet exists, an assistant earns its keep by running scenarios you would not bother to type out. Give it the inputs and ask for one change at a time, then all together.
Here is my day sheet (inputs in B1:B10, formulas in B12:B17). Change one input at a time
and report day profit, margin and break-even portions for each:
1. Pork cost up 10%.
2. The pitch fee moves from 7% to 9% of takings.
3. The share of sales paid by card rises from 85% to 95%.
Then change all three together. Show the working for one scenario so I can check it,
and tell me which single input moved profit the most.On the new price board at 115 portions, a good answer looks like this (illustrative, and worth re-entering one row into your own sheet before you believe it).
| Scenario | Day profit | Margin | Break-even portions |
|---|---|---|---|
| New board as it stands | $132.72 | 12.4% | 93 |
| Pork up 10% ($8.25 a kilo) | $126.33 | 11.8% | 94 |
| Pitch percentage 9% instead of 7% | $111.23 | 10.4% | 96 |
| 95% of sales by card | $128.77 | 12.0% | 93 |
| All three together | $100.89 | 9.4% | 97 |
The surprise is which input matters. Two extra points of pitch percentage cost $21.49 a day, more than three times what a 10% rise in pork costs. It is easy to haggle with a supplier over a few cents a kilo and accept an organiser's percentage without a word. Knowing the numbers lets you decide which pitches are worth taking and which to decline.
The same truck at a festival with a flat $300 fee
A second pitch shows how much the event type changes the answer. Say the truck is accepted at a festival that charges a flat $300, non-refundable, with no percentage. The day is longer and needs more of everything.
| Festival day line | How it is worked out | Amount |
|---|---|---|
| Pitch fee | Flat, no percentage | $300.00 |
| Fuel | 120 miles at 40 cents | $48.00 |
| Generator fuel and propane | Longer service hours | $40.00 |
| Wages | Owner 12 hours at $20, two helpers 10 hours each at $15 | $540.00 |
| Prep kitchen share | Two prep days | $90.00 |
| Yearly costs spread out | Same as before | $110.00 |
| Total | $1,128.00 |
On the new price board each portion brings in about $9.34 and costs about $2.40 in food, so after the card percentage and the 15-cent fee, each extra portion contributes roughly $6.65. Break-even is $1,128 divided by $6.65, or about 170 portions. At 200 portions the day makes about $203; at 250, about $535. Below 170 the flat fee is a straightforward loss.
The useful question for the organiser is therefore about people, not price: how many visitors came last year, and how many food vendors shared them? Say 4,000 people attended and 14 vendors traded. That is about 285 visitors a vendor, so roughly three in five of them would have to buy a portion from you to reach 170. A ratio like that is a warning, and it is the kind of number that should settle the decision before you pay.
Your hatch also caps takings: a window that serves 25 portions an hour for six hours tops out at 150, short of the 170 needed. To cover the day at 150 portions, the average portion would have to bring in about $10.23 instead of $9.34, roughly 10% more, so the real question is whether this crowd will pay festival prices. If the answer is no, decline the pitch.
Formulas to paste into a spreadsheet
An assistant will build this layout in a minute if you ask for formulas rather than answers. Ask it to leave inputs in column B, and to explain each formula in plain words. The layout below uses the Saturday example, so you can test the sheet against the numbers above before you trust it with your own.
B1 Portions expected 115
B2 Items per card sale 1.5
B3 Takings expected 989.50
B4 Food and packaging cost 275.84
B5 Fixed day costs 557.20
B6 Pitch fee, % of takings 7%
B7 Share of sales by card 85%
B8 Card rate 2.6%
B9 Card fixed fee per sale 0.15
B10 Margin target 12%
B12 Fixed card fees =B7*B9*B1/B2
B13 Takings needed =(B4+B12+B5)/(1-B6-B7*B8-B10)
B14 Affordable food cost =B4/B13
B15 Dish price ceiling =[cost per portion incl. waste]/B14 (one row per dish)
B16 Day profit at B3 =B3-B4-B7*(B8*B3+B9*B1/B2)-B6*B3-B5
B17 Break-even portions =B5/((B3/B1)*(1-B6-B7*B8)-B4/B1-B7*B9/B2)With the example inputs, B13 should read about 1,069.70, B14 about 25.8% and B16 about 55.55. If yours differ, the formulas are wrong, not the example. If you have never asked a chatbot for spreadsheet formulas, the ChatGPT Excel guide covers the basics.
Three slips in AI-built price sheets
All three below are illustrative, and all three were easy to catch once the example numbers were in front of the person checking.
- Dividing by sales instead of portions. The sheet spread overhead across 77 sales, giving $7.27 each, rather than across 115 portions, giving $4.85. Every suggested price came out too high. It showed up because the bun's suggested price was more than the owner had ever seen anyone pay.
- Treating the pitch percentage as fixed. The sheet kept the old $69.27 pitch fee after the new prices, so profit looked $5.95 better than it should. After the rise, 7% of $1,074.50 is $75.22. Any fee that is a percentage of takings must be recalculated whenever takings change.
- Counting only service hours. The owner's wage covered the five hours at the market and not the prep day or clean-down, so the margin looked healthy. It was caught by comparing the sheet's wage line with ten hours at $20 plus seven at $15, which is $305.
When to rerun the sums, and what to tell regulars
Four things should trigger a rerun: a main ingredient changing in cost, a new pitch fee or fee structure, a new kind of event, and every six or so trading days of fresh takings. Each rerun takes minutes once the sheet exists, and it is the only way small supplier increases stop eating the margin.
When prices move, say so plainly on the board. An illustrative sign: "Prices change this Saturday: pulled pork bun $12.50, loaded fries $9, chicken rice bowl $12.50, fries $4.50, lemonade $4. The falafel wrap stays at $10. Ingredient, fuel and pitch costs have all risen." Keep it short and don't apologise. For more on wording and timing, planning and announcing a price increase with AI's help has templates you can adapt.
Questions food truck owners ask about pricing
What food cost percentage should a food truck aim for?
There is no single figure, because yours depends on how much the day costs before any food is sold and how many portions you sell. In the example here it came out at 25.8%. A busier day or a lower pitch fee would raise it. Treat a published target as a first guess, then replace it with your own sum.
Should my own wage count as overhead?
Yes. If your hours are left out, the margin you think you have is really your unpaid wage, and a quiet day will look fine when it isn't. Put a realistic hourly rate on the owner's prep, trading and clean-down hours, then judge profit as what is left after that.
Can ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini set my prices for me?
They can build the sheet, read invoices, test scenarios and draft the sign. They cannot see the stall next door, your regulars' ceiling or how fast your hatch can serve. Let the assistant do the arithmetic, then make the pricing decision yourself and check one dish by hand.
How often should I redo the sums?
Redo them when a main ingredient or the pitch fee changes, when you add a new type of event, and after every six or so trading days of fresh takings. A quick monthly refresh of cost per portion from your latest invoices keeps small supplier changes from eroding the margin unnoticed.
Further reads
- AI Menu Engineering: Which Dishes to Promote, Reprice or Drop — Decide which dishes to push, reprice or drop once the sums are done.
- Food Truck Inventory Management: Build Tomorrow's Prep List — Cut waste so the 5% allowance can shrink.
- How to Price Ice Cream: Cost per Scoop and Menu Prices — Another portion-costing method for a small, high-volume counter.
- Delivery App Commission: Should Takeaway Menu Prices Rise on Apps? — Model commission before listing a menu on a delivery app.
- Food Truck Booking Software: Screen Private-Event Requests With AI — Quote private events using the same day-cost sheet.
- How to Price Catering: A Cost-per-Person Sheet With AI — Price per head when the booking is a set menu.
- Can AI Write a Business Plan for a Food Truck? A Worked Example — See these day costs inside a full business plan.
- AI Food Menu Generator: Build a Seasonal Menu From Your Supplier List — Paste your supplier sheet into ChatGPT, draft dishes from what is deliverable, cost every plate and check allergens before printing.
- Coffee Cart Business Plan: Costs, Pitch and Menu Built With ChatGPT — Plan start-up costs, pitch fees, per-cup margins and break-even cups for a coffee cart in one spreadsheet, with ChatGPT drafting and you checking.
- Street Food Stall Business Plan: Pitch Fees, Margins and Stock With AI — Cost every portion, compare pitch fees on wet, normal and busy days, and plan stock and gas for a street food stall, with illustrative numbers and AI prompts.
- Food Truck Ordering App: Pre-Orders, Pitches and Where AI Helps — Compare Square, Toast and food-truck platforms on pre-order slots, location sharing and fees, then see where AI helps and what an app will never do.
- AI Tools and AI Development: The Complete 2026 Guide — the AI hub, including every tutorial in the AI-for-business series.
Sources: Square's fees page for its published in-person card rates (checked October 2026). Every other figure is illustrative arithmetic, not an industry benchmark.