We spoke to food truck owners to understand their workflows and learn which features of their current POS systems are essential to their operations (and which annoyances with their current platforms bothered them the most). Even within this niche of the foodservice market, there are meaningful differences in size and scale of operations: some interviewees own and operate a single truck with a spouse, and others manage a fleet of trucks spanning state lines with varying state and municipal tax rates.

Interviewees felt that their tools are esoteric and complicated. Common POS platforms attempt to support huge swaths of the market, accommodating as many use cases as possible without specializing in any one. Since our team is two or three orders of magnitude smaller than the competitors, designing a condensed feature set as a minimum viable product (MVP) was already a necessity, but this restriction wound up being an inherent advantage in our case! Even better, designing something purpose-built for food trucks allowed us to prioritize features missing from competitors, like associating transactions with a location for more meaningful reporting data.

Our conversations also helped us identify common features we thought might be important, but weren’t often used in practice. Kitchen display systems, for example, were universally not used by our interviewees, who favored tried-and-true paper ticket printing, which could be annotated with a sharpie to add names or pager numbers.

We also made considerations for the future of the existing consumer and vendor applications. Instead of deprecating them, we identified areas for ways for these disparate branches to grow together, and mindfully left a foundation in our POS project architecture to better support a roadmap of potential future features like online ordering.