Best Food Trucks

Kevin Davis spent seven years in consumer IT support and computer repair through his first startup GeekAtoo, which he scaled to 7,000 providers nationwide before selling it for $20M in 2016. After an earn-out period, he was looking for a completely new vertical and became fascinated by the food truck industry—specifically the inefficiencies in how trucks find locations and how customers experience long lines.

Rather than building from scratch, Kevin merged with his co-founder who was already running a food truck booking platform and served as head of the National Food Truck Association. This co-founder had been helping spin up regional food truck associations across the country and had already built the foundational lot booking infrastructure. The merger created Best Food Trucks, combining Kevin's tech expertise with established market presence.

The platform addresses a core inefficiency: food truck operators had been using Excel, email, and manual PayPal links to book locations. Best Food Trucks automated this by connecting trucks with property owners and event organizers who wanted to create food truck markets. The company operates a three-sided marketplace: property owners get quality-of-life improvements for their tenants at zero cost, truck operators pay $50 per booking location, and Best Food Trucks takes a $5 fee per transaction plus $149/month SaaS fees for analytics and compliance tools.

By leveraging the co-founder's existing network and reputation in the National Food Truck Association, Best Food Trucks launched with immediate traction. By the time of this interview (approximately 6 months into Kevin's involvement), the platform had already onboarded 1,000 trucks across 10 cities. The lot booking model proved especially sticky because it solved a real problem: property owners wanted food trucks on their premises to improve tenant quality of life, but managing that was a hassle. Best Food Trucks eliminated the friction.

The lot booking model worked exceptionally well, generating $1M in total processed transactions in 2017. However, the consumer-facing order-ahead and subscription features ("Foodie Plan" at $3.99-$3.99/month) were still in pilot mode. Kevin had run a viral Facebook video where he walked into random food trucks and offered $100k investments, which generated 1.2M views and validated consumer interest in the category.

The key insight was that trucks move frequently—some booking locations multiple times per month—creating recurring revenue opportunities. A thousand trucks booking an average of 20 times annually at $50 per booking equals $1M in GMV, with Best Food Trucks capturing $100k in transaction fees plus additional SaaS revenue.

By the time of this interview, Best Food Trucks was fundraising for $500k on a priced round with existing investors already committed. Kevin was aggressively investing his own capital into food trucks directly, announcing plans to deploy $1M over 24 months. He had expanded the lot booking operation to 60 trucks in November/December and was preparing to launch consumer-side convenience fees and subscriptions across 5-10 lots by month-end. The long-term vision involved building exclusive data on which food types succeed in which neighborhoods, potentially graduating to owning and franchising proprietary food truck brands nationwide—positioning Best Food Trucks as a data-driven conglomerate operator similar to Bloomin' Brands, but for mobile vendors.