Free tool
Should You Take That Vending Fee
Put in the fee, your service hours, and your own plate economics to see what a booking actually clears and how many tickets it takes to get to zero.
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How Many Tickets Your Window Can Actually Clear
Enter your order time, your build time, and how many tickets the kitchen can work at once to see the ceiling on your lunch rush and what the line loses.
Throughput is the quiet limit on a food truck. You can market a lot harder, park somewhere better, and price sharper, and none of it matters once the line is longer than the window can serve in the hours you are open. Most owners feel this as a busy day that somehow did not produce a big number, and the cause is almost always seconds per ticket rather than demand.
This planner separates the two halves of a ticket. There is the time at the window taking the order and payment, and there is the time behind it building the food. Cutting either one raises your ceiling, but they respond to different fixes: a second point of sale helps the first, a prep change or a shorter menu helps the second.
Your result
Seconds per ticket
95
Total hands on seconds from the order being taken to the handoff.
Tickets per hour at this speed
76
Your ceiling per hour with the stations you can actually run.
Tickets you can serve in the rush
152
The most tickets this window can produce during the rush.
Customers the line loses
28
Arrivals beyond capacity, assuming the people at the back give up.
Real service is lumpier than an average, so treat walkaways as a signal that the line is over your ceiling rather than an exact headcount.
Find the station that sets your pace
Every truck has one bottleneck and it is usually obvious once you stand in the aisle for ten minutes. On a fried chicken truck it is the fryer basket cycle. On a birria truck it is the griddle space for quesatacos. On a smash burger truck it is the flat top surface. Everything else can run faster and it will not raise your ticket count by one, because the line moves at the speed of the slowest station.
The fix is rarely more people. Adding a body to a truck that already has three people in it usually slows things down, because the aisle is the real constraint. What raises throughput is taking work off the bottleneck: par cooking, portioning proteins into service pans before the rush, moving drinks to a cooler the customer reaches themselves, or cutting the one item that occupies the fryer for four minutes.
What walkaways cost beyond the missed ticket
The number of customers the line loses matters more than the lost gross, because those people usually decide something about your truck while they stand there. Someone who waits eighteen minutes and leaves without food rarely tries again the next week, and in an office park you are working the same few hundred people over and over.
This is where the location broadcast and the window speed connect. If you tell your list where you are and the rush arrives in one block, a slow window turns your best marketing into a line people abandon. Trucks that stagger the message, post a heads up on prep, or note that a second order point is open handle the same demand without burning goodwill at the back of the line.
Questions about this calculator
How do I measure seconds per item honestly?
Time yourself building ten of your most common order during an actual rush, not during prep. Use the median rather than the average, because one dropped basket will skew a small sample. Do it again after any menu change, since a new item can move the whole number.
Does a second point of sale really help?
It helps when the order and payment time is a real share of the ticket, which is common on trucks with long menus or lots of modifiers. If your kitchen is already the bottleneck, a second point of sale just builds the queue faster and does not raise the number of plates you hand out.
What is a good tickets per hour number for a food truck?
It depends entirely on the format, so compare yourself to your own history rather than to anyone else. What matters is whether your ceiling clears the break-even ticket count for the spots you take. If it does not, the menu or the layout needs work before the schedule does.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The Vending Spot Vetting Checklist
Twenty checks across four stages for deciding whether a curb or lot is worth your truck before you commit a season to it.
You Have the Number, Now Fill the Window
The count you just ran assumes people actually turn up at the curb you are working today. A short demo shows the daily broadcast reaching everyone who has eaten from your window in about the time the flat top takes to come up to heat. Bring the figures from this page and we will talk through the spots they apply to.