WELCOME AGAIN 🚚
Hi! Welcome to the 6th issue of My Favorite Food Truck Newsletter!
If you're new to mobile food, this issue is for you. If you've been at it for years, stick around anyway. You'll see some things you can steal for your own truck.
Here's the truth nobody says out loud: being new feels like being behind. Everyone else has the regulars, the follower count, and the reviews. But new trucks have something the veterans don't, which is a clean slate. No bad habits, no old logo you're attached to, no dead Google listing from 2021.
This week's Food Truck of the Week launched in April, and they're already doing several things right. We'll also build a first-90-days marketing checklist you can start today, whether your truck is brand new or you just never set it up properly.
Have you checked out PARKED TO BOOKED, our free Google Business Profile playbook for food truck operators? Grab it on the Products Page if you haven't yet.
Let's meet this week's Food Truck of the Week.
🚚 FOOD TRUCK OF THE WEEK
Bubba Boba: Mansfield, Missouri
Facebook Logo
Their Story
Aaron is from Southern California. I am from Kansas City, but I was living with Aaron in SoCal. Aaron has a friend in Santa Barbara who owns a brick-and-mortar boba shop. We both tried boba tea for the first time there, and we loved it! Fast forward a couple of years, we moved to Mansfield. We attended a local festival where we had a difficult time finding a drink vendor. Aaron had been pondering the boba idea as a business and thought a mobile boba business could be successful. Neither one of us relished the idea of punching a clock, so we turned the idea into a reality, attending our first event in April of this year.
Custom Inflatable
Bubba Boba Drink Grouping
Bubba Boba Menu
Their inflatable and trailer go great together!
Their Setup: A 20-foot boba trailer (including the trailer tongue).
Their Best-Selling Items:
Straw-Mango Strut: Strawberry and mango in a tea or soda base, topped with strawberry and mango popping boba.
Cookie Butter? You better! Their signature spin on brown sugar milk tea, usually served with brown sugar chewy or popping boba.
What They're Nailing:
Names that sell. "Cookie Butter? You better!" gets attention before anyone tastes it. It's a menu item people repeat to their friends, and it looks great on a sign.
Quality control on the details. After a bad experience with slimy tapioca pearls, Jennifer worked out a cooking method that prevents the problem. She spent years making medicine, so getting the product right is second nature to her. Boba lives or dies on texture, and Bubba Boba treats that as a priority.
Networking at events. They credit the veteran vendors they've met at events with sharing experience, knowledge, and resources. Learning from people ahead of you is the fastest way to skip mistakes.
One platform at a time. Their Instagram is merged with Facebook. Jennifer is learning Instagram first, then moving on to TikTok. That's the same "pick one and be consistent" approach we talked about last issue.
Their Business Tips & Lessons:
We think we feel a bit too green to offer marketing tips. However, we believe connecting with the people in communities is crucial. We don't just want people to remember our drinks; we want them to remember us and a fun experience.
The Takeaway: Aaron and Jennifer say they're too green to give marketing advice, but they just did. They found a gap (no drink vendor at a festival), built their offer around it, gave their drinks memorable names, and treated the vendor community as a classroom. That's a solid first season, and the community-first approach is the marketing. 100% recommend (5 reviews) on Facebook. They are off to a great start.
🔗 Check out Bubba Boba (their website) on Facebook and Instagram (@mobilebubbaboba)! Like and follow them to show your support!
*Want your truck featured next? *Your participation in Food Truck Of The Week will help you get more traffic to your social media. Reply to this newsletter with the following information.
Send your best photos. (You can send any you'd like to see in the newsletter)
Send your logo. (We can grab it from Facebook, but if you send one you like, that's cool)
Send a short story about how/why you got started.
What is your best-selling menu item?
Send your social media links. (If there's more besides Facebook, let me know)
What's your biggest marketing tip or business lesson?
Don't forget your first and last name or names
📈 MARKETING PLAYBOOK
Your first 90 days are the most important marketing window you'll ever get.
THE PROBLEM:
Most new trucks pour everything into the build, the menu, and the launch day, then treat marketing as something to figure out later. By the time they get to it, they've served for weeks or months with no Google listing, no reviews, and a social page that started strong and then went quiet. The first customers a new truck gets are also the easiest to turn into loyal regulars, and most trucks never capture them.
HOW TO FIX IT: (Your first-90-days checklist)
Days 1–14: Set up the basics.
Claim and set up your Google Business Profile, with hours, a specific food category, and photos. (Issue 2 and the PARKED TO BOOKED playbook cover this step by step.)
Pick ONE social platform and post there on a set schedule. Do that before you touch a second one.
Put a QR code on the truck that links to your page, so every customer becomes a potential follower. QR codes work great on your business card too.
Days 15–45: Build proof.
Ask every happy customer for a review in person at the window, with a QR code or link ready. Aim for your first 10 reviews.
Post your location and hours on the same days each week.
Name and photograph your "hero item." One signature product that people can describe in a sentence is easier to market than a menu of 15 items. Bubba Boba's drink names do this work for free.
Days 46–90: Widen the circle.
Introduce yourself to other vendors at every event. Trade tips, tag each other on social media, and ask what they'd do differently. This is the free marketing team Bubba Boba credits, and it only costs you a conversation.
Post one behind-the-scenes video of how you make your best-seller. (Vintage Vixens' lemonade reel is proof this works.)
Look back at what your customers responded to and do more of it.
Remember: Being new means you don't have the bad habits yet, so build the good ones first. The trucks that look established a year from now will be the ones that did the boring setup work in their first 90 days.
⚡ QUICK BITES
📰 Industry News: According to FLIP (Food Liability Insurance Program), when food truck owners were asked what their best customer acquisition method was, 37% ranked events at the top, followed by social media at 27%, location at 18%, and word of mouth at 16%.
86.9% of food truck operators use Facebook to promote their business, making it the most popular social media platform for the entire industry.
New mobile food vendors often assume word of mouth will carry them through the first season, but the data says otherwise. It ranks dead last among the top four acquisition channels, while social media and location-based discovery work together to drive nearly half of new customers.
That's exactly why an optimized Google Business Profile and an active Facebook page aren't "nice to have" extras for a brand-new truck. They're doing more of the customer-finding work than your regular customers are, especially before you've had time to build any word-of-mouth base at all.
Pair this stat with the PARKED TO BOOKED playbook, and it makes a strong case for setting up discovery channels on day one rather than after the first slow month.
💬 FOOD TRUCK MAILBAG (Q&A)
Q: I'm just getting started, and nobody knows who I am. How do I get people to show up at my first few events?
A: Start with the crowd that's already there. At a festival or market, the event organizer is promoting the event, so your job is to make sure the people who come know exactly where to find you.
Post the event name, your location, and your hours 2–3 days ahead, and post the morning of again. Tag the event's page so their followers see you. Then make one item stand out.
At your first events, people will choose the truck with the memorable name and the clear photo over the one with the biggest menu. Finally, get your name and social handle in front of every customer, because the goal of an early event is followers and reviews as much as sales.
Got a question for next week? Reply directly to this newsletter!
🎁 SHARE & EARN REWARDS
Enjoying this newsletter? Send it to a fellow food truck, trailer, or pop-up owner, especially anyone who's just getting started. Share with your friends too!
🚚 HOW'S MY DRIVING?
I’d love to hear what you think of this newsletter and the My Favorite Food Truck website. Your feedback genuinely shapes what can be published in the next issue, so if there's a topic you'd like to see covered, just reply and let me know, and we'll make it happen.
Let's keep building, one parking spot at a time. 🚚
Rob West
My Favorite Food Truck Newsletter
