Food trucks thrive on outdoor business, so how do Texas operators survive our extreme weather?

To survive Texas weather as a food truck owner, one must act like an ant.

That’s one of the first lessons Misti Buard, known as the “Food Truck Lady,” tells her clients as they attempt to navigate the unpredictable and often grueling task of trying to run a successful food truck.

Because Texans live with unforgiving hot summers, unpredictable cold seasons and annoyingly inconvenient inclement weather, Buard tells her clients to act like ants: Store up reserves during the slow season, hunker down during inclement weather and migrate to where the food is. 

So when Texas cities like Houston and San Antonio live through one of the hottest summers on record as they did this year, how do food truck owners and employees survive the heat, and how does the threat of climate change affect their outlook on the future of running a food truck?

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“It’s only getting harder,” said Felipe Landaverde, owner of the food truck El Gualjillo. “I wish good luck to anyone who’s in this industry.”

One food truck owner recalled an employee experiencing nosebleeds in the middle of their shift because of the extreme heat. Another said an employee would run out of the truck in the middle of serving customers and vomit behind the bus because of the heat. But their health problems wouldn’t stop them from getting back to work.

“You just have to keep doing your thing,” said Ryan Robinson, owner of the Brunch Bus. Robinson’s food truck is a renovated postal carrier truck so it was larger than the typical trailer that food truck owners use to sell menu items. It was equipped with a grill, multiple fryers, refrigeration and a large vent on the ceiling.

“If you’re new to it, it’s going to be hard,” Robinson said. “At first it’s a shock being in here. We love it though, but the downside is dealing with the weather of it all.”

Handling Houston heat

In Houston alone, more than 514 food trucks have manually signed up to be part of Roaming Hunger  — a website that tracks food trucks and connects them with food service solutions — but it's likely many more food trucks serve a city with more 2.3 million people and more than 12,000 restaurants. Food trucks exploded in popularity in the past decade and were a $1.2 billion industry nationwide in 2017, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates.

For Jeffery Koenig, the owner of Homies H-Town Street Food, owning a food truck as opposed to a brick-and-mortar restaurant was an easy decision.

“With brick-and-mortar, you have to be open seven days a week. You have to have your staff. And it’s so hard to please everyone that walks into your restaurant,” Koenig said. “I think people have a different mindset when they open the door and walk in. They expect so many different things. But when it comes to a food truck, if we’re out of something, if we sell out, instead of people getting mad, they say ‘good for you. You guys are doing good today.’ ”

With Texas being no stranger to extreme heat, flooding and even freezes, navigating how to make such a venture successful can be tricky, even life-threatening for those working inside the trucks.

Koenig said his food truck’s internal temperature would read 120 degrees during peak summer hours. To prepare, Koenig said he and his brother, who operates the truck with him, would drink a gallon of water each before each shift. Koenig said they would still go home with headaches and blurred vision.

“People ask us if we have an air conditioner, and we do, but it doesn’t matter because you have those two fryers pumping out all that heat exhaust that gets sucked into the vents, so what little AC we have is immediately gone,” Koenig said. “The AC is mostly decoration than anything.”

Surviving bad weather

The heat remains some of the slowest months for food trucks in Texas. Business picks back up in the fall but dies down again beginning in November through February.

Because of the slower business during the hot and cold months, some food trucks decide to only operate during the evening hours. And when it rains, floods or freezes, most owners are forced to close up shop and rely on the reserves that Buard tells her food truck clients they need to have. 

Buard, who has worked on a food truck in temperatures as low as 14 degrees below zero for the Food Network’s Great Food Truck Race in Alaska, said one of the most important things an owner of a food truck can do to remain in business in Texas is get as many catering gigs as possible. 

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“Your food truck may be your first pillar of income, the second pillar needs to be corporate catering. The third pillar needs to be drop-off food services,” Buard said.

Landaverde said he is fortunate to have a permanent residency at a Houston bar in the Heights, where he can get a steady stream of customers. He used to operate his food truck El Gualjillo in Austin until a few years ago. In Austin, Landaverde said, customers would line up in the rain and cold for food. In Houston, not so much.

“When we were in Austin, weather was not really an issue,” he said. 

However, the freeze of 2021 was a stroke of luck for Landaverde. Like an ant, he migrated to where he could survive.

“One way we survived was by cold-calling apartments,” Landaverde said. “One apartment said they were going to go through Roaming Hunger, but were glad we called. We did like $15,000 in sales. We were the only source of hot food for that apartment complex for a couple of days.”

The threat of climate change is expected to make summers hotter and more extreme, create more extreme precipitation events and push Arctic air further south in the winter. When the food truck owners were asked if they were concerned about the threat of climate change to their business model, most of them said that whatever happens, they would be there serving food regardless.

“There’s always going to be an outdoor activity or a building that doesn’t have a kitchen, meetings, conferences, festivals, where there will be a need for a food truck,” Koenig said. “But I do feel like our overall business will be affected because people won’t be going out as much.”

Silvia Garcia, the owner of Awesome Food Trailers, which sells food trailers across the country, said most of the customers in Texas don’t really ask for modifications to their trailers before they buy them, compared to some of the other markets they sell trailers in. 

Ross Resnick, CEO of Roaming Hunger said climate change is going to be another obstacle that food truck owners will have to overcome

“The spirit of entrepreneurship is to examine different challenges and figure out how to keep going,” Resnick said. “That’s what entrepreneurship is.”