FOOD TRUCK INVENTORY MANAGEMENT
Keep your food truck stocked with these inventory management tools
Enterprising small business owners often make the mistake of thinking of food trucks as the “easy version” of running a business. After all, you don’t have a location to keep up or property to pay for, and food truck staff is often kept to an affordable minimum. With all those benefits, it might be easy to think that such a business enterprise pays for itself with little additional work on behalf of the owner.
The fact is, nothing is further from the truth. Food trucks are a difficult business to manage. Being on the go, food truck owners find themselves in a constant battle between what they have in the truck, what their customers order and how long it will take to fill their endlessly depleting stock. This pressure is enough to close down the vast majority of food trucks shortly after they begin.
Modern point of sale (POS) systems may not seem like your first stop for inventory management, but the features they offer make them an ideal choice for food trucks. With advanced inventory management options and mobile capabilities, food truck inventory management becomes a breeze.
Balance demand vs. inventory
Food trucks need to be prepared for the orders coming through the window. This means knowing what your customers like and how much they would order in a given day/week/month while balancing those expectations against what you can feasibly provide. This leads to a couple of important inventory considerations:
Item performance
Above all, you need to know how well a given item is performing. If you have too much of an unpopular item, it uses valuable storage space in your truck that could be used for more sought-after ones.
If you have too little of something your customers actually want, you may need to turn away customers at the window due to low stock. This runs the risk of your customers not coming back for a repeat visit.
Item cost
Inventory is a constant balancing act of price vs. stock. Even if an item is incredibly popular, it is important to consider what it costs you to get that item in front of your customers.
Pay too much and you could compromise your overhead with your reorders. Order too little and you may need to take a customer favorite off the menu.
Item reorders
The ultimate inventory question is “How far can you let your stock deplete before you need to reorder?” This needs to be done quickly enough that you don’t run the risk of running out entirely but with enough time that you don’t overstock the van and compromise space and the quality of your ingredients.
These are the most pressing questions food truck owners face in terms of inventory management. By weighing item performance, cost and the length of time or amount needed before reordering, you will find the perfect balance in which you can maximize your return on investment (ROI) on ingredients. Modern POS systems offer these tools for food truck inventory management:
| Inventory tracking |
|
Keeping track of item popularity can help you identify your “low-turn” stock. This means that the ingredients you ordered six months ago which are still unused will be identified by the food truck inventory management system when a preset amount of time has gone by. This can be manually set by the user or automatically selected. |
| Ingredient cost tracking |
|
Modern POS systems don’t exist in a void. What an ingredient actually costs is going to affect how much you must sell it for and how much you can afford to buy at one time. Manually plug in the market cost of your items or import them using a QR code to automatically track the cost of your ingredients. This keeps a close eye on your bottom line and helps you make difficult decisions about what to order and when to reorder them. |
| Predictive analytics |
|
Predictive analytics can help you set automatic alerts to inform you when an inventory item has fallen below a preset amount. This can be further adjusted to automatically reorder the ingredient at this point instead of sending alerts that may get overlooked. This ensures that you will never find yourself lacking necessary ingredients or having too much at a time. |
| Inventory tracking |
|
Keeping track of item popularity can help you identify your “low-turn” stock. This means that the ingredients you ordered six months ago which are still unused will be identified by the food truck inventory management system when a preset amount of time has gone by. This can be manually set by the user or automatically selected. |
| Ingredient cost tracking |
|
Modern POS systems don’t exist in a void. What an ingredient actually costs is going to affect how much you must sell it for and how much you can afford to buy at one time. Manually plug in the market cost of your items or import them using a QR code to automatically track the cost of your ingredients. This keeps a close eye on your bottom line and helps you make difficult decisions about what to order and when to reorder them. |
| Predictive analytics |
|
Predictive analytics can help you set automatic alerts to inform you when an inventory item has fallen below a preset amount. This can be further adjusted to automatically reorder the ingredient at this point instead of sending alerts that may get overlooked. This ensures that you will never find yourself lacking necessary ingredients or having too much at a time. |
These amounts are usually the product of very involved number crunching that would normally take a food truck operator time to calculate. Modern POS systems simplify this process by calculating the amount automatically using the information you input for your inventory. This process keeps your food truck inventory management as up-to-date as possible, ensuring that you always contain the right amount of inventory items for your business needs.
Manage incoming to outgoing inventory
Where you keep your inventory is likely to change based on what kind of service you provide. When keeping stock in the truck itself, you need to have information on what you’re losing as well as what you’re adding to your inventory. For those keeping their inventory in a separate location, there will need to be information on what there is in both the truck and storage space.
This is why your inventory management system must keep multiple tallies of your ingredients. This is typically done in three steps:
Quickly scan incoming items into your POS platform, preferably using a barcode-equipped smartphone with a POS app.
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2
Use the POS app to easily add new products into the system, which in turn automatically updates the POS system in all areas.
Execute comparison reports so you can seek out inefficiencies or instances of product leakage.
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1
Quickly scan incoming items into your POS platform, preferably using a barcode-equipped smartphone with a POS app.
2
Use the POS app to easily add new products into the system, which in turn automatically updates the POS system in all areas.
3
Execute comparison reports so you can seek out inefficiencies or instances of product leakage.
These tools make your POS a central inventory management tool for your food truck. With the ability to automatically scan items in, you cut down on the manual labor necessary to keep track of your stock. This frees up your time (and the time of your employees) to focus on providing an excellent experience for your customers.
Customize inventory types for accurate management
You need to make sure that, above all, your inventory management system works for you. This can be difficult depending on what kind of food truck you are running. For example, a specialty food truck may want to keep tabs on ingredient providers in the area to ensure they are getting the best price for their stock. On the other hand, a mobile bakery might want to view their inventory based directly on the products themselves.
Either way, it’s important to have a food truck inventory management system that adapts—not just to what your business is but to what it might become too. Here are a few custom options available for food truck inventory management:
Category
Track and group your ingredients according to custom categories. This helps you tailor your inventory strategy to whatever means are most convenient for you and whatever your truck sells.
Product
Sort directly by product for a straightforward inventory management strategy. This helps you identify your best-selling products and, by extension, which of your ingredients may be underperforming.
Supplier
Make placing your reorders easiest by organizing your inventory according to where you buy it from. This setup also gives you a great idea of which vendor you buy most from, which can be helpful when identifying valuable business connections.
Using these categories, it becomes significantly easier to customize your inventory management strategy to your business needs. This prevents you from having to adjust your management style in order to acclimate to a new piece of tech which ultimately creates more problems than it solves. Instead, a top-of-the-line inventory management system acclimates to you and adapts to whatever needs your food truck may have.
Food truck inventory management goes mobile
Arguably one of the most important parts of your food truck is the concept of mobility. If you are putting your business on wheels, it’s essential that all your tools are able to go with you wherever you set up for the day. This is why a good food truck inventory management system requires a modern POS with mobile capabilities. Here are just a few of the benefits a mobile system can offer:
| Online data storage |
| Data protection | Accessibility |
| Bringing your inventory data online means that it is no longer kept solely on your device. This means that should something happen to the tool, you can rest assured that your inventory data will remain available. Modern POS solutions also offer offline coverage, allowing you to keep going even when the internet goes out. These systems automatically update when the internet comes back on, making sure that your inventory data never skips a beat. | Making inventory decisions is often something that needs to be done quickly, which means that you need to have access to that data at a moment's notice. Bringing your inventory data online ensures that no matter what device you are using, you will be able to access your inventory data. This information will also be available at any time of day, regardless of whether or not you have your actual POS system available. |
| Customization |
| In truck | Off-site storage |
| No two food trucks are the same—this is why you need to make sure that your inventory management system is properly tailored to your needs. For those keeping their inventory in their truck, a mobile POS app offers the ability to keep up-to-the-minute tabs on what the truck has, updating with each sale. This information is available from any device, meaning that you don’t need to bring a laptop on the road if you don’t want to. | For food trucks keeping their inventory in a second location, mobile POS apps with inventory management provide some great solutions for keeping different inventory amounts for your truck and the overall stock of various ingredients. Having this information via mobile app ensures that you can keep tabs on this information from anywhere, regardless of what device you have available. |
Using a mobile app for your food truck inventory management needs keeps your inventory data at your fingertips, no matter where you are or what device you have handy. The online storage capabilities protect your data while increasing your access to it, and the inherent customization options available for them ensure that your inventory management system will be one that ultimately meets your needs. This keeps your food truck moving and your business growing, at the same time wrangling your difficult tasks into a single user-friendly interface.
Implementation is easier than ever
The benefits listed above will no doubt simplify the task of inventory management for your food truck. That being said, it might still sound daunting to try to implement. With all the stock you currently have for your food truck, it’s easy to imagine the many hours you will have to spend adding each individual item into the system before you can get back to business.
The truth is that modern POS systems are designed to do much of this initial heavy lifting for you. Most of your inventory can be scanned in with just a QR code or manually input using your existing records, at which point you will be quickly off to the races.
We know that this journey is easiest with a trusted partner. A company like talech has years of experience helping small businesses and food trucks realize the full potential of their POS. Contact us anytime for more information or a free demo.
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