Calculators
Food truck menu pricing calculator
Price one menu item from what it costs to make, and see what each sale leaves before the rest of the day's costs.
Free to use, and no account needed.
What each one leaves
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Enter what you charge and what it costs to make, and this will work out what each one leaves.
This is an estimate, and it is only as good as what you type into it. Nothing you enter here is saved or sent anywhere.
What one item leaves is not what you make
This is the part most pricing advice skips. The gap between what you charge and what the ingredients cost is not profit — it is what that sale contributes toward everything else the day costs: the person on the window, the propane, the pitch fee, the commissary, the insurance, the mobile unit itself.
An item that leaves $8.25 forty times over has put $330 toward those costs. Whether anything is left after them is a different question, and this page cannot answer it.
Work out what a whole day keepsWhat to put in the cost
Everything that leaves with the order. The meat and the tortilla obviously, but also the sauce nobody weighs, the lime wedge, the foil, the container, the napkin and the fork. Those are the ones that quietly move an item’s cost by a dollar.
Not the crew, not the propane, not the parking. Those belong to the day rather than to one order, and counting them here would take them twice.
About the 30% rule
“Keep food cost around thirty percent” is the oldest rule in the trade and it is a starting point, not an answer. It came from sit-down restaurants, where rent and waiting staff dominate. A mobile food business has different costs in different proportions.
Use it to sanity-check a price you already had in mind, rather than to set one. What people will actually pay at your window is the other half of it, and no calculator knows that.
Tax is not in this
The price here is the price before sales tax. Sales tax is added on top and remitted to the authorities that levy it — in Colorado that can be more than one authority for the same taco, so the rate depends on where you are parked.
Colorado sales tax rates by cityNext to this
- Food truck profit calculatorWork out what a service day actually leaves you, once food, crew, card fees and site costs come out of the sales.
- Colorado sales tax rates for food trucksThe published combined sales tax rate for Colorado cities, what each rate is made of, and which authorities you actually file with.
If you run a mobile food business
A tool answers once. Lonchero answers every day.
Everything on this page works from figures you type in, and it is yours to use as often as you like without telling us anything. What it cannot do is know how your week actually went. That is the part an account is for.
- It works from the days you recorded, not from figures typed in for one question.
- It keeps the answer current as your sales, crew pay and costs change.
- Connect Square or Clover, or write the day down yourself — both reach the same result.
30 days free, then $39 a month. Cancel any time, and the tools on this page stay free whether you sign up or not.