Food trucks… those wonderful mobile vendors who provide yummy goodness to event attendees, neighborhoods, and more. Their popularity continues to grow around the world, and if you’re like us, the last outdoor event you attended most likely had a food truck or two.
Food trucks are great for both the event planner and event attendees, bringing larger crowds and generating more revenue. Sometimes though, finding available food trucks for an event can be a difficult task. Dozens of phone calls and emails, hoping someone is available, or at the very least, calls or emails back.
In Oklahoma, there’s a company making this daunting task easier for anyone in need of food trucks. Using Foxy and multiple other tools, OkieFoodTrucks.com has helped hundreds of event planners and food trucks connect. In addition, they provide the largest database of Oklahoma based food trucks on the web.
How It Works
The idea is pretty simple. Food trucks sign up to have their food truck listed on the website and to receive notifications when an event is in need of trucks.
Event planners fill out a simple form, providing details about their event, needs, etc. This information gets sent to the food trucks via text and email. Interested trucks click a link to have their contact information sent to the event planner.
Event planner receives a list of qualified, available food trucks and contacts the trucks they want to have attend their event. The whole process can happen in minutes, resulting in a win-win for both the event planner and food trucks.
Technologies Used
There’s a lot happening under the hood, requiring multiple tools and technologies. Here are a few key technologies that help keep things running smoothly:
- Foxy – Drop-in custom ecommerce for one-off and recurring billing
- Webflow – Site design and hosting
- Power Importer – Keeps Airtable and Webflow CMS data in sync
- Jetboost – Food truck search and filter functionality
- Zapier – Sends Foxy orders, form submissions, etc. to Airtable
- Airtable – Where food truck, event, and customer information is stored and managed
- Twilio – Used to send text message event lead notifications to food trucks
- Campaign Monitor – Used to send email event lead notifications to food trucks
Unique Ecommerce Needs
OkieFoodTrucks.com needed a customizable ecommerce solution that would allow them to sell different product types, and easily be layered in where needed. The standard shopping cart options just didn’t cut it. In addition, powerful discount/coupon functionality would be needed for various promotions. Foxy was a perfect fit.
Memberships
When food trucks sign up, they have a couple of membership plans to choose from:
- Yearly
- Monthly
- Free
Yearly and monthly plans use Foxy’s subscription functionality. The free plan is handled with a $0 one-off charge, allowing for a consistent signup flow for all customers (which makes the rest of the integrations much easier). Once a food truck chooses their plan, they are taken to Foxy’s secure checkout, where they can input their billing info and finalize their order.
Foxy handles the recurring billing from there, charging the customer at whatever frequency their plan is on. In addition, Foxy automatically handles the subscription “dunning” management (declined card notification, reattempts, and expiring card notices).
Upsells
In addition to the membership plans, OkieFoodTrucks.com offers event planners an opportunity to get their event promoted for a small one-time fee.
When an event planner has submitted their event info (to find available food trucks) they are taken to an upsell page where they are offered low-cost event promotion.
If the event planner chooses “yes”, they will be taken to the Foxy checkout page (with the event promotion product already added to cart), where they can securely pay. Once paid, their event gets promoted on the OkieFoodTrucks.com website, social media, and is included in a monthly email blast.
Automating The Whole Thing
Behind the scenes, there are multiple types of data that must talk to each other for everything to operate properly. Each step in the food truck and event planner journeys is important and ensures that the end goal is met every time… food trucks and event planners connecting with each other.
Food Trucks
When food truck owners sign up through the Foxy checkout flow, their contact info and membership plan details are automatically stored in Airtable, via Foxy’s Zapier integration. A follow up email is automatically triggered, linking to a form where food truck owners can submit their truck listing info and media (ex: food type, location, menu, social links, etc.)
Truck listing info is linked to the food truck owner in Airtable and is used to determine how and when the food truck gets event lead notifications and what type of food truck listing they get (ex: paid members get more photos). Plus, since all the data is right in Airtable, seeing who is still on the free plan and sending them a discounted upgrade offer happens with a click of a button.
Once approved, food truck information is synced with Webflow CMS (via Power Importer), creating a food truck detail page and including truck info in the public database.
Event Leads
When event planners fill out the “book a food truck” form, information is automatically added to Airtable (via Zapier). Event details are reviewed and cleaned up in preparation for that day’s event lead notification.
Each day OkieFoodTrucks.com sends out an event leads notification, containing on average 3-5 new event leads. Notifications are sent via text message (Twilio) and via email (Campaign Monitor).
Available Food Trucks
Notifications contain a list of event leads with a link/button (for each). When a food truck clicks this link/button, they are taken to a page in Webflow where a success message is displayed. Behind the scenes, the event ID and food truck ID are being sent to a Zapier webhook that automatically adds their food truck as a linked record for the event lead.
As soon as there is at least one available food truck for an event lead, a shareable Airtable view for the event is generated and an email notification is triggered (using Airtable Automations), sending the event planner an email, containing the link to their available trucks. As more trucks add themselves to an event lead, the list is automatically updated for the event planner.
Final Step
Available food trucks lists include photos, location, food type, social links, contact info, and more. The event planner simply browses their available trucks and then reaches out to the trucks they’re interested in having at their event.
Only The Beginning
OkieFoodTrucks.com continues to add more features, functionality, and automation processes to make finding food trucks easier for event planners. What they have accomplished is a great example of what’s possible when you get the right technologies working together.
Maybe you’ve done something similar with Foxy and your favorite technologies. Or maybe you have an idea but don’t know how to get started. We’d love to learn more about your project. Please leave a comment or email us.
