Portable BBQ Business

cburgin

Well-Known Member
Joined
Mar 20, 2005
Location
statesville/boone NC
Me and a friend are in the beginning stages of starting up a mobile BBQ business. We are mainly interested in only selling at festivals and other random events around our area. Any tips or advice to help a small business get started? I have a call into the health dept now to get the basics and I believe we are going to set the business up as a general partnership and 1099 us under the business name. This is not our main source of income. We both have great jobs but love to cook and spend time with new people so we figured we would give this a shot and at least create a tax break while doing it. Any input would help.
 
You will likely have to get health inspections for every county you sell food in. Some require more hurdles than others. Keep that in mind when planning your schedule and budget.
 
rockcity said:
You will likely have to get health inspections for every county you sell food in. Some require more hurdles than others. Keep that in mind when planning your schedule and budget.
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Yep. My boss has a BBQ business. Have to have inspections from every county and some cities also require it. Even for some of his competitions it is required.
 
A good point though... I think there's a BBQ festival in probably every town in NC. :D

They take that stuff very serious here...
 
I just talked to the health inspector for my county and he told me that you cannot start cooking until you have been issued a permit on site. How does this work when you are cooking BBQ the right way, low and slow for 12-15 hours at a time. There is no way to set up early for a street festival and cook all bbq on site and have food ready to sell by the start of a festival. It is hard for me to believe that everyone at such events and festivals have a certified kitchen they cook in before hand. Any light on the subject?
 
cburgin said:
I just talked to the health inspector for my county and he told me that you cannot start cooking until you have been issued a permit on site. How does this work when you are cooking BBQ the right way, low and slow for 12-15 hours at a time. There is no way to set up early for a street festival and cook all bbq on site and have food ready to sell by the start of a festival. It is hard for me to believe that everyone at such events and festivals have a certified kitchen they cook in before hand. Any light on the subject?
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How do the food truck guys do it? Why cant you do the same?
 
cburgin said:
I just talked to the health inspector for my county and he told me that you cannot start cooking until you have been issued a permit on site. How does this work when you are cooking BBQ the right way, low and slow for 12-15 hours at a time. There is no way to set up early for a street festival and cook all bbq on site and have food ready to sell by the start of a festival. It is hard for me to believe that everyone at such events and festivals have a certified kitchen they cook in before hand. Any light on the subject?
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Most that I've seen tag team with a brick-and-mortar location where the majority of the cooking/smoking is done. It's cheating, but you then set up your rig, get your inspection and then once inspected and open, transport your food in and essentially re-heat on the spot. Very little actually gets cooked in a food truck, it's more of a warmer/holding area for food which is then prepared onsite.

I've often thought about starting small into portable food-service by way of a hot dog cart, but the regulations are every bit as stringent on one and you must have a brick-and-mortar "commissary" that you supposedly report to and close at every day you work. I know for a fact that the local one here in Lexington is not stored at a brick-and-mortar, it's just parked in the driveway of his apartment complex.

I'd love to do something different with a hot dog cart and serve breakfast. Not sure on the regulations, though.
 
Ive been working near a guy that's sets up and sells BBQ out of a trailer im guessing its 26-30 long and the back 8 feet of it is a smoker I'll take a pic of it next time I eat there
 
Donate profits to charity and get a non profit exempt status...

Call me, i helped Terry with the hotdog cart alot and can help you some.
 
You may have to have a sticks and bricks place set up for cooking and have that inspected. You may need to be set up as a caterer to transport and serve.
 
I can't really give you any cooking or food regulation advice but the one thing I can offer to you that will probably save you the most heartache and trouble.... Do not go into a partnership. It will not end well. No matter how close you guys are and no matter how much you talk it through now, at some point that friendship will be over and you will regret doing it at all.

Sit your partner down and decide on one of you to own/run the business solely. Figure up the cost to own and run the setup and pay that to whichever of you is chosen then split the profits 50/50 or something that is fair but don't partner up.
 
The food truck route really gets us into a whole different situation. With a food truck, everything is normally cooked in an inspected and certified kitchen then loaded on the certified food truck to keep warm...in most cases it seems. Also, the permit situation is different. One permit per year with a food truck, a new permit each festival with onsite cooking and tent. We do not have access to a kitchen and really dont want to get that far into it...if we can avoid it. Im sure we could do a food truck only without a kitchen but unsure of how that works and how we could smoke bbq. Snappy, sent you a pm. Chris, your words are duly noted. Like I said, very early stages of all of this.
 
@upnover

Chip has a bunch of insight into the health inspection aspect, IIRC.
 
So many things have changed since my days in the food service, but, the ones doing this these days have a sponsoring restaurant, They operate under that businesses permits and such, but they are prone to periodic inspections, just like the restaurant it's self. Basically, all food on the truck is precooked, either bought that way, or cooked prepared at the restaurant. Then, only re-heated or heated at the sales site(s). While the Truck or trailer has to have sanitation facilities, all dishes and so on are "supposed" to be washed and sanitized at the restaurant.
 
This is true for hot dog carts all around Raleigh? What about the food trucks that are cooking burgers and pizza on the street? Not all food trucks have brick and mortar locations. Well hardly any of them do.
 
benXJ said:
This is true for hot dog carts all around Raleigh? What about the food trucks that are cooking burgers and pizza on the street? Not all food trucks have brick and mortar locations. Well hardly any of them do.
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Thats my thoughts too. They fry up french fries and other things on the spot. It seems more than just handing out pre made food. Maybe Raleigh has different rules that allow roach coaches to operate differently.
 
6BangBronk said:
A good point though... I think there's a BBQ festival in probably every town in NC. :D

They take that stuff very serious here...
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one of the things I miss most about NC!
 
I do hope that you can get it off the ground, but be warned... Around Lexington for example, there is an "Old Boys Club" when it comes to BBQ. Some of them are dying off and/or closing. BBQ (at least in this area) is so overdone, you run the risk of just being "one more BBQ joint". People will compare you to the HoneyMonk, Speedy's, Smiley's, etc... and unless you have something that is WAY better, it will be hard to gain traction.

When I was working at Ecolab, Lexington was part of my territory and I saw a couple of attempts at starting a new BBQ joint and they all seemed to fail. For one, the older restaurants have their smoker's already built to non-existent codes. They are grandfathered in against the new health/building codes. To open a new BBQ joint, you are looking at serious coin to invest in equipment up front just to compete with stuff that's been in use for over 50 years and has paid for itself over and over.

Your choice of food purveyor will make or break you as well. Bigger names like Sysco and US Foods are nice for variety, but typically have such high minimum order amounts that they are hard to work with up front. Smaller more local places like Orells have better prices, but you end up with the same food as they have at every other place in town, so your "special cut fries" look like the ones at Biscuit King - because they are.

It's been said, the best way to make a small fortune in the restaurant business is to start with a large fortune.

Food trucks are trendy now because they appeal to a different market. Used to, a food truck was more of a mobile concession stand which sold pre-packaged sandwiches and cold drinks, usually at a factory or a jobsite. Quality didn't matter because the market didn't have much of a choice in where they ate. When you have 30 minutes to get down from your work perch, get in line for the food truck, eat and get back to work, you didn't get real finicky about the quality of beef in your hot dog. You ate it and if it wasn't hot enough, you set it on a hot girder to warm it up.

Now, gourmet food trucks are popping up in tech parks serving all sorts of ethnic foods to software engineers, business men, you name it. Some of the questions you will need to ask yourself are:

Where am I hoping to set up? What is the demographic of my desired customer? Where is my nearest direct competition? What about indirect competition? What is my target food cost percentage? What makes me any different than what's already out there?
 
Food trucks are different. They are a rolling kitchen and have to meet the same requirements as a bricks and sticks kitchen from what I have by told by my health inspector. We can go that route but most food trucks have stuff we dont need. We are going to cook pulled pork, brisket, beans, slaw...besides running water, we need a smoker, a warming box, counter/table top, and a fridge. We use no propane when cooking, only 100% wood. So this is what makes a food truck a hard route because we have to have a lot of stuff for inspection that we will ever use it seems.
 
No matter what you do, if you prepare food you will need a brick and morter to supply you with a grease trap.

EVERY food truck has a sister restaurant supplying the grease trap.
 
JonKarl said:
if you need a large smoker grill, Donny builds them
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Yes I do, you can see one here:
http://www.nc4x4.com/forum/threads/project-pig-smoker.154559/

Mild to wild, whatever you want. The best way I've seen to run a part-time once or twice a month operation is to get in cahoots with a local charity and cook/sell for them and write it off on taxes. May be able to split profit with them, not sure. Someone here may be able to answer that.
 
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