How to Keep Your Roadside Food Truck Business With Cones

Listen in! Pick up some expert advice to a reader's question that we selected from CyberSchmooz.

Roadside food truck businesses are hugely popular worldwide, with small business owners running them and their growing fan and customer bases. In fact, you will find that most customers that visit a food truck do it out of loyalty to their favorite food truck owner because they like the food that is served there rather than the point of it being purely for convenience along their intended route.

This means that spending time building a rapport and a relationship with your customers and trying to please them will really pay off. When these people have purposefully driven out of their way or changed their route so they can visit you and sample your food over any other food truck, the least you can do is look out for their safety.

#1 Keep your customers safe from road users

It is likely that you are situated on a busy through-road or at the side of a highway. Having cars and other vehicles speeding past your oncoming customers is just asking for trouble, so to keep them a little safer and warn motorists of their presence, you could use a few safety cones to indicate the separation of the road from the area in which you inhabit. These should be brightly colored so everyone can see them.

#2 Protect your main business asset

If you park your truck so that the serving hatch is away from the road, you are going to want to protect it from the vehicles driving along the road behind it, especially in poor or low lighting. For this, you may want to use safety cones with reflective strips or fluorescent coverings so they can be easily seen and steered around.

It is important to remember that your food truck is pretty much your business; although it could possibly be replaced due to being involved in an accident, it would take time. Not only that, but if you are cooking inside, then it could be a lot more than your damaged food truck, and there may be no coming back from an accident like that.

#3 Segregate parking areas from pedestrian walkways

In order to keep your customers safe while between the parking area and your food truck, you should think about using some sort of divider. This can be a safety feature as well as an effective form of queue management. A good idea would be a ring or looper cone, as these have reflective areas but also a space at the top where the rope can be pulled through to create a more defined barrier.

Final thoughts

When you are supplying your customer base with their favorite foods from your food truck, part of your mind should be on their safety as well as your own. Many road traffic accidents happen every day, some of which sadly involve pedestrians. By investing some money in additional safety measures, such as purchasing a few choice road cones, you could be ensuring that your customers stay as safe as possible when purchasing from your business.

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