Blog / November 29, 2023 / Jeff Stumpf / UPDATED February 16, 2024

Food Truck vs Restaurant vs Ghost Kitchen: Which is Better?

You’ve finally done it—you’ve mastered your menu. After iterating your recipes, you’ve dished out the best ones to family and friends, eagerly awaiting authentic praise.

You’ve done the work. All that’s left is setting the table.

Deciding where you will serve your best dishes is a defining step in making your restaurant business dreams a reality. The choice between a food truck vs. a restaurant (or ghost kitchen) is all that stands between you and your future happy, full customers.

But which of these types of restaurant concepts is the better business plan? Only you can determine that—with these key considerations.

Factors	Food Truck	Restaurant	Ghost Kitchen
Capital	Mid-high	High	Low-mid
Staff	Low	High	Low
Flexibility	Low-mid	Low	High
Equipment requirement	Mid	High	Mid
Order size and revenue per customer	Low-mid	Mid-high	Low-mid

Part 1: Food trucks

Food trucks are restaurants that allow you to prepare, cook, and serve food entirely from a moving vehicle. They’re equipped with electricity, mobile kitchen equipment, and point-of-sale technology to put your entire operation on wheels.

For a restaurant concept that’s more casual than fine dining and doesn’t require sit-down table space or large service staff, food truck ideas are a viable option.

Capital

When comparing food truck vs. restaurant costs, food trucks are slightly less expensive than restaurants. Food trucks can cost anywhere from $50,000 to over $100,000 between initial start-up and ongoing operation costs.

When learning how to start a food truck, you’ll learn that there are costs involving:

Renting or buying the initial truck or vehicle
City and state permits that allow you to pop up and serve your food
Kitchen equipment, supplies, and inventory for the truck
Licenses for food safety, vehicle requirements, and zoning
Vehicle maintenance, fuel, and up-keep of power generators
Employee salaries, bonuses, and tax-adjacent costs

Staff

Speaking of employees, one benefit to a food truck business is that they typically don’t require more than a handful of staff members. (After all, the truck won’t fit many more.)

Typically, to properly staff a food truck for a day’s worth of serving food, you’ll want to prepare 1–2 line cooks, 1 packaging and expediting staff member, and 1 team member to manage the point-of-sale engagements and payments. And, of course, you’ll need at least one staff member certified to drive the vehicle—although this employee can double up on responsibilities.

Flexibility

A food truck is one of the most flexible forms of restaurants available today. Its flexibility is perhaps the number one reason why its prevalence has grown almost 8% in the last 5 years in the US alone. A food truck’s ability to open at different locations frees it from sleepy locations, harsh rental fees, and demanding city requirements.

With a food truck, you can:

Serve your street food virtually anywhere within driving distance
Forego the need to design and decorate a sit-in space
Expand your food establishment’s presence to new eaters every day
More closely control sanitation standards within your space

Equipment

Think about the last commercial kitchen you saw or worked in. Scale that down to a 20% size, and you’ve got the vision for your food truck cooking space.

Food truck equipment must entirely embody the meaning of space efficiency. Where a commercial kitchen can sprawl out comfortably with stainless steel as far as the eye can see, a food truck’s mobile kitchen only has room for one commercial-sized grill top.

That said, food trucks still require all of the essential equipment needed to operate a restaurant at full capacity. You’ll need:

Cooking and refrigerating equipment
Warming and holding equipment
Food preparation equipment
Serving and packaging supplies
Cleaning supplies
A point-of-sale computer system

Order size and revenue per customer

When the grills are wiped clean, the tips are counted, and the generator has powered down, how does the final revenue of a food truck compare to a restaurant or ghost kitchen business model?

The average total sales (before expenses) of food trucks in the US is between $20,000 to $40,000 per month. When a food truck is profitable, its monthly expenses average around 85% of its monthly sales. If a food truck serves 100 people per day, after expenses, the revenue comes out to about $2 per customer.

Part 2: Traditional restaurants

Traditional restaurant operations are also known as “brick and mortar” restaurants, or a physical building in which an established restaurant opens to, cooks for, and serves the customer base.

Traditional restaurants favor food entrepreneurs who want to create an atmosphere around their cuisine. Your food becomes an entire mood, shaping the dining room’s color scheme, the corresponding cocktail menu, and the wait staff’s uniforms.