Too Many Cooks in the Kitchen?

Finding Your Truck's Perfect Crew Size

I've watched a guy in Portland named Eddie run a Korean taco truck by himself for three years. Every single service, alone in that rolling metal box, taking orders, cooking, plating, running the register, making change, cleaning as he goes. He moves like a machine—efficient, focused, never a wasted motion. And he's absolutely miserable. He told me once, over a beer after he'd closed up, that he couldn't remember the last time he'd actually tasted his own food during service. No time. No space. No bandwidth for anything except survival.

Then there's this couple I know in Austin who run a breakfast taco truck together. They've got this rhythm, this wordless communication where she's on the flattop and he's on assembly and money, and they flow around each other like dancers who've been doing the same routine for years. Which they have. They're not making dramatically more money than Eddie, but they're not dead inside either. They laugh during service. They actually seem to enjoy it.

The question isn't which one is doing it right. The question is: which kind of operation matches your reality, your menu, your ambitions, and your sanity?

The Romantic Lie of Going Solo

There's something deeply appealing about the solo truck operation. It's you, your food, your vision, undiluted by anyone else's incompetence or agenda. You keep all the money. You don't have to worry about no-shows or someone burning your reputation while you're not looking. It's pure. It's simple. It's also, frequently, a trap.

Let me be clear: some people can pull this off. If you're running a very specific kind of operation—limited menu, long cook times that let you batch prepare, maybe coffee and pastries where you're not actually cooking to order—then yeah, solo might work. But if you're doing any kind of cook-to-order operation, any menu that requires actual multitasking, you're not running a business. You're running a very elaborate performance art piece about suffering.

Here's what nobody tells you about going solo: you can't take breaks. You can't go to the bathroom without shutting down. If you run out of something, you can't step away to grab it. You're handling money with the same hands you're touching food with, which is both gross and illegal in most places. Your tickets pile up, your customers wait, and the whole time you're moving at absolute maximum capacity just to keep from drowning.

And God forbid something goes wrong. A piece of equipment fails, you drop something, a customer wants to have a conversation—any little disruption cascades into chaos because you've got zero redundancy. You're a one-person Jenga tower, and you're always one piece away from collapse.

The math seems compelling at first. Let's say you're doing eight hundred dollars in a lunch service. If you're solo, that's all yours minus food cost and overhead. Add a person at fifteen bucks an hour for a four-hour shift, and you're giving up sixty dollars. But here's what that sixty dollars buys you: speed. Capacity. The ability to serve more customers because tickets aren't backing up. Professional separation between money and food. Your sanity. And maybe, just maybe, the ability to build something that doesn't require your physical presence every single moment.

The Two-Person Symphony

Two people changes everything. Suddenly you've got options. One person can work the grill or the flattop while the other handles assembly and expo. Or one cooks while the other runs the window—taking orders, handling money, plating, serving. You can have an actual division of labor instead of one person doing a frantic juggling act.

I watched a truck in Brooklyn—Thai street food, really good stuff—where the owner finally brought on a second person after a year of solo operation. His ticket times dropped by almost forty percent. Not because he was suddenly faster, but because he wasn't constantly context-switching. He could focus on cooking while his guy handled everything else. His daily sales went up by thirty percent because he could actually handle the volume instead of having people walk away from the line.

But here's the thing about two-person operations: it only works if you find the right person. And that's harder than it sounds.

You're not looking for someone who can cook—though that helps. You're looking for someone who can read a situation, who moves with purpose, who doesn't need constant direction. Someone who understands that a food truck during lunch rush is not the place for leisurely conversation or checking their phone. You need a partner, not an employee. Someone who gets the rhythm, the urgency, the fact that every second matters when you've got fifteen people in line and forty minutes to feed them.

The best two-person truck operations I've seen have clearly defined roles that rarely shift. Not because flexibility is bad, but because during service, when everything's moving fast, you can't be negotiating who does what. One person owns the cooking, the other owns the customer interface. Or one owns hot prep and the other owns cold assembly. Whatever the split, it needs to be automatic, muscle memory, so that during the chaos you're not thinking—you're just executing.

The Three-Person Equation

Three people in a truck starts to feel crowded. There's only so much space in these things, and at a certain point you're bumping into each other, getting in each other's way, creating inefficiency through proximity. But for certain operations—high-volume, complex menus, multiple cooking stations—three is the magic number.

I knew a barbecue truck in Nashville that ran three deep: one guy managing the smoker and proteins, one on sides and assembly, one running the window and doing all the customer-facing work. They could crank out a hundred orders in a two-hour lunch window. The math worked because their average ticket was high—twenty-five, thirty bucks—and they had the volume to support three people's wages and still clear profit.

The break-even on a third person is real simple: if adding them allows you to increase sales enough to cover their wages plus generate additional profit, you do it. If not, you're just adding complexity and cost. Most trucks don't have the volume to support three people unless they're doing events, catering, or have genuinely exceptional daily sales.

The Hidden Costs Nobody Mentions

Here's what complicates the math: labor isn't just wages. It's also the time you spend training, managing, scheduling, dealing with call-outs and drama. It's unemployment insurance and workers' comp. It's the reality that some people will steal from you, or show up hungover, or just not care about your food as much as you do.

I've talked to truck owners who've tried to bring on help three, four, five times and finally given up because the hassle exceeded the benefit. The person doesn't show up, or they're slow, or they can't handle the pressure, and suddenly you're spending more energy managing them than you would've spent just doing it yourself. That's a real thing. It's not paranoia—it's experience.

The solution isn't to stay solo forever. The solution is to be extremely selective about who you bring on, to pay them well enough that they have a reason to care, and to train them properly. Not a fifteen-minute walk-through, but actual training where they understand your menu, your standards, your systems. Invest the time upfront, and you'll save yourself endless frustration later.

Reading Your Own Numbers

You need to know your numbers cold. What's your average ticket? How many tickets can you do solo in a service? What does that ceiling look like with two people? With three? How many hours is your service window? What are you paying for labor?

Let's say you're doing fifty tickets in a lunch service at an average of fourteen dollars. That's seven hundred dollars. Solo, after food costs at thirty percent, you're clearing four hundred ninety bucks minus overhead. Now add a person at fifteen an hour for four hours. You're down to four hundred thirty dollars. But if that person allows you to do seventy-five tickets instead of fifty—same price point—you're suddenly at a thousand fifty in sales, seven thirty-five after food cost, six seventy-five after labor. That's almost two hundred dollars more than going solo.

The math changes everything. But you need to know your actual numbers, not hopeful projections. Track your tickets per service. Time how long things take. Figure out where your bottlenecks are. Is it cooking speed? Assembly? The register? Because adding a person only helps if they're solving your actual constraint.

The Personality Factor

Some people are built for solo operations. They're self-motivated, they thrive on independence, they don't need human interaction to get through a shift. Others wither in isolation. They need someone to riff with, to share the stress with, to confirm they're not losing their minds.

Be honest about which type you are. If you're the kind of person who gets energy from working alongside someone else, who performs better with an audience even if that audience is just one other person, then going solo is going to grind you down no matter how good the economics look on paper.

I've seen people build genuinely successful solo operations, but they're usually either temporary—a stepping stone to something bigger—or they're run by a very specific type of person who genuinely prefers working alone. For everyone else, there comes a point where you need to decide: do you want to own a job, or do you want to build a business? Because a business, by definition, shouldn't require your presence every single second.

The Test Run

If you're solo and thinking about bringing someone on, don't just hire someone and hope it works. Start with events or catering where the stakes are contained. Bring someone in for a busy Saturday, see how it feels, see if the economics improve. Track everything. Did you serve more customers? Was the experience better for them? For you? Did you make more money after paying them?

Give it three or four real trials before you commit. Chemistry matters. Speed matters. Reliability matters. You're looking for someone who makes your operation better, not just different.

And if it doesn't work? If you try the two-person thing and it's just adding stress without adding value? It's okay to go back to solo. It's okay to decide that for your operation, for your menu, for your life, working alone is actually the right call. Just make sure you're making that decision based on reality, not fear or stubbornness.

Because at the end of the day, the right crew size is whatever lets you serve good food consistently without destroying yourself in the process. Everything else is just details.

How many people are squeezed in your food truck? Maybe it's time to reconsider!

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