 food business idea. So if you've always wanted to start a restaurant of your favorite cuisine, you may want to consider starting a food truck business. A food truck is basically a restaurant on the go. With a mobile food business, you serve customers all over the city by reaching them instead of waiting for the customers to find you, as is the case with sitting restaurants. So this is how you can start. For most, you need to buy a vehicle and the size of the vehicle will depend on the kind of cuisine you're looking to serve. For instance, a regular fast food truck serving burgers, sandwiches, shakes, etc may not require heavy infrastructure. So a medium-sized tempo will suffice. Whereas if you're looking to open something like a pizza parlor that may require extensive infrastructure like an awan, you will have to buy a vehicle as big as a traveler or a mini truck. Another food truck model is to set up a base kitchen in the city where all the food is prepared and the truck is used to sell the food on the go. To give you an example, in the case of South Indian cuisine, summer and Japanese have to be prepared in advance and not with eat serving. Or say if you want to open an ice cream parlor, you will need a heavier machinery to prepare all the flavors of the ice cream. So for such a model, you can set up a base kitchen in the city for bulk cooking and buy a smaller vehicle with basic fittings like a stove and a sink to heat and sell the food. Now that the vehicle is decided, let's move on to understand the license of permissions you will need to set up your food truck. Like any food business, you have to register with Food Safety and Standard Authority of India. You won't need a license yet as it is only required after your annual revenue crosses Rs. 12 lakh. Next, you will require a state permit for your vehicle if you want to operate within the same state. However, if you want to operate interstate, then you may even want to get a national permit. For instance, in the case of Delhi NCR, Noida falls under UP whereas Gurgam is in Haryana. So to be able to roam around in Delhi NCR, you will have to get a national permit. You might also have to get a health trade license from MCD if you have a base kitchen and a fire NOC if the space of your kitchen is over 90 square meters. Now the next and the most important step is to choose the right locations for your truck and how to market it. The target audience of trucks is families and residential here neighborhoods so choose gated colonies, societies, lanes around hostels as your primary areas. For marketing, you can distribute pamphlets and run campaigns on social media. Most importantly, your truck will market your business. So make sure that you design it nicely with an attractive logo and park it in areas where it is clearly visible. The expense in starting a food truck business is a fully equipped vehicle whose price will depend on its size. A smaller tempo kind of vehicle will cost you 3-4 lakh whereas a bigger vehicle like a traveler will be upwards of 8 lakh. A used vehicle will obviously cost you half of the new vehicle or maybe even less. Equipment fittings will be another rupees 4-5 lakh that includes both base kitchen and fittings in the truck. Next, you need to buy a POS terminal for billing, inventory keeping, CRM, analytics etc which is another 16-18,000 per terminal. You may even have to buy a laptop or computer along with a printer for POS which can cost you up to 35,000. Now apart from these defined expenses, add another rupees 50,000 that you will have to shell out initially on licensing, marketing and other miscellaneous costs. So that's about one-time expenses. Now to talk about recurring costs, the bulk of your costs will go into stopping. One head chef along with an assistant to handle operational tasks can put you down by 50-60,000 rupees per month. Of course, if you are the chef then you will save on this cost and you will only have to hire assistants. Other smaller repeat expenses will include fuel of the vehicle, its annual insurance renewal, electricity bill, groceries and other utility deals and all this will not be more than 25% of your revenue. One thing we would like to add here is the rent of the base kitchen if you plan to open one. A medium-sized shop in an inexpensive location can come for a rent of around 18-20,000 per month. Food truck will also take 3-6 months to start getting sizable customers but you must ensure that you start serving a minimum of 50 orders per day within the first three months to build a sustainable business. An effective way to achieve this would be to visit fixed residential areas on specific days to establish a base of repeated customers. Another way to generate good revenue would be to tie up with offices and take bulk orders for parties. Now let us give you an estimate of what you can earn from a food truck business. Once you have a sizable customer base of 80-100 orders per day, you can easily book a profit of 35-40% on the total revenue. This is after removing traffic costs of 30-35% and groceries and utilities that amount to another 30% of the total revenue. We hope that you soon take the plunge to start your own food truck business. Meanwhile, stay tuned and log on to www.entrepreneur.com for more business ideas.