Mobile Payments and Food Trucks: A Winning Combination?

If you’ve started to notice that there’s more sun in the sky, and the briefest hints of warming can be felt in the air as well, then you know warmer weather isn’t far off. With spring, and warmer weather, comes a panoply of exciting features of the season, including for many, food trucks. These ultimate to-go restaurants are also turning to mobile payments technology to improve their operations, but it’s not always so easy as some would hope.

One firm, QuickBite, recently tried to tackle this concept itself. Developed after its founder and current CEO Richard Reedy discovered that waiting for food to be made ready to eat was a big chunk of time out of a lunch hour that only went so far. Food trucks helped, but there was no way to place orders with them in advance. Thus, QuickBite was born.

Using the platform is comparatively simple; QuickBite is available for iOS and Android devices, though it seems to be focused mainly on Austin, Texas offerings for now. The user can then place an order, paying for it with Apple Pay or debit or credit card. The restaurant gets the order, and users can pick up their order with a simple name identification or by showing the order screen.

QuickBite charges its own customers, the restaurants and vendors involved, 10 percent of each order, and once $40 in fees are paid, QuickBite drops that down to just credit card fee costs, which means bringing in QuickBite doesn’t take a big bite out of the bottom line.

Such a service could go quite some way toward getting more customers into food trucks and similar operations, and given the growing popularity of food trucks in general—which often ultra-specialize to make up for their very small and highly mobile kitchens—it could be one of the most welcome additions to the restaurant-goers arsenal. We already know the impact that mobile payments have on restaurants—it almost crippled Starbucks for a while there, though from more of a surplus of business than anything else—so bringing it to the still-nascent food truck market should be a smart move.

Mobile payments technology has already done wonders for restaurants. That it couldn’t do likewise for food trucks is a leap of logic too obscure to follow.