Food On The Streets

Context

Food On The Streets is a web platform for both food truck owners and food truck consumers. The platform allows food trucks to manage their schedule menu and make those items publically available to any visitor of the platform.

The problem

Locally, our food truck scene has grown tremendously over a handful of years. What didn't grow, however, was the management. For the consumer, the only way to know what food trucks were going to be running and where on any particular day was Facebook. This was either through a 'Food Truck Tracker' Facebook group or by visiting specific food truck Facebook pages. For the food truck owner, this means they have to post their schedule on their page, to a group admin, and maybe even to the group themselves. Menus and schedules get lost in the ocean of the Facebook feed algorithm and competing posts from other owners and consumers alike.

What I did

The primary objective was to allow any user to quickly identify what food trucks were operating near them, so they could make decision without having to look all over the place. The feed needed to be easy to read (and filter if you're craving something specific) and give the user all the information they needed to make a decision.

What good is a feed of food truck schedules if there are no schedules to view? The owners needed an easy way to set up their schedule, one time, and have it instantly publish out to users.

Result

I created a performant, feature rich, accessible, platform for food trucks to make their information available in a dedicated location. Food On The Streets is a platform that is publically accessible by consumers with no account required, allowing them to keep the 'what should I eat today?' question easy to answer.

What I'd do differently

Food On The Streets is a great platform but still in it's early overall stages. When I first launched the platform, it came along with a price tag for the food truck owners; $10 a month with a 60 day free trial. I wasn't trying to profit from this platform, I wanted to be able to cover the costs of hosting the platform, storing the data, and enabling cool stuff like push notifications to users when a food truck is about to open. What I didn't anticipate was how much this would be inhibitor to a food truck joining the platform. As of writing, I've updating the platform to be free for all users but the damage seems to be done. I'm not a sales person but if I were to start over, I would have done more canvasing and gotten more commitment ahead of the platforms development. Food trucks need traffic to warrant the time and potential cost and consumers need content and benefit to visit the platform.