Go or No-Go? The Food Truck Event Calculator

"We had 2,500 people last year. The vendor fee is $500." Here's how many will actually eat at your window — and whether the day pays.

An organizer's crowd is not your covers. Your capture rate is — the share of a crowd that buys from you, from your own last three events — capped by what your window can serve an hour. Then the day costs what it costs: food, the food you prepped and threw away, card fees, labor from prep to teardown, miles, propane, supplies, the fee. And the day you gave up somewhere else has a number too.

The sample. 2,500 people, 6% capture: 150 covers, $2,100 in sales, $290 in profit — $36 an hour for an eight-hour day — and $130 less than the regular spot would have netted. Break-even is 114 covers. The crowd that needs at 6% is 1,894, three-quarters of the claim.

Six capture rates. The same event at 3% to 12%, each with covers, profit and a status, so you see how wrong the claim can be before the day goes red — and where the window caps you.

The dashboard grades it — covers against break-even, profit against the regular spot, profit per hour, what the organizer takes, the crowd the claim has to be, waste, window used, labor — HEALTHY, WATCH or ALERT, with a chart of profit at every capture rate beside the regular spot. One portrait page. Answer the email with a number.

Built for

Food trucks and trailers · coffee and shaved-ice carts · BBQ and taco pop-ups · farmers-market food vendors · caterers weighing a festival · anyone who has ever paid to be somewhere.

What you get

One .xlsx file, five tabs, instant download. Excel, Google Sheets, Apple Numbers, LibreOffice. No macros, no add-ins, no subscription. A realistic sample is loaded so you see every color of the grading before you type over it. Copy the workbook per event.