Digital loyalty cards for food trucks

Why this works for food trucks

A food truck's constraint is not loyalty but discoverability: regulars want to come back and cannot find you. A wallet card that can push today's pitch turns a loyalty card into a location channel.

Food trucks have an unusual relationship with loyalty. Customers are often extremely willing to return, the food is the reason they stopped in the first place, but they do not know where the truck is on a given day. That is a distribution problem wearing a retention problem's clothing.

A wallet card solves it in a way a paper card cannot, because the card can carry a push message. 'We're on Market Square until 3' reaching the lock screen of forty people who already like your food is worth more than any stamp mechanic.

Enrolment has to be fast in a way that is extreme even by counter standards: a truck serves a queue with no seating, no table, and often no shelter. Typing a phone number while handing over the food is the only method that survives contact with a lunch rush in the rain.

Does loyalty work without a fixed location?

Yes, and the wallet notification is worth more to a food truck than to any fixed business, because your customers' main problem is not knowing where you are today. A card update that reaches the lock screen answers that question for everyone who has your card.

This inverts the usual argument for loyalty. For a café the card is mostly about the reward; for a food truck it is a location channel that happens to carry a reward.

How do you enrol when you are serving fast?

By taking the phone number rather than asking for anything. A truck window has less room and more time pressure than a café counter: there is often nowhere to put a QR sign and no space for a customer to stand scanning it while a queue forms on the pavement.

What should be messaged, and how often?

Location and nothing else, most of the time. A single message on the days you are somewhere new or unexpected will be read; a weekly promotional message will get the card deleted and take the location channel with it.

Keep it to two or three pushes a month even though the temptation is greater here than elsewhere. The channel works because it is rare.

What food trucks usually struggle with

• Customers cannot find the truck day to day
• No fixed location means no passing-trade habit
• Extremely compressed service windows at lunch
• Weather and pitch availability change the schedule constantly

What we would set up for you

A stamps card with 8 as the goal and a free main item as the reward. Customers enrol by phone number at the counter (they never take out their phone), and the card lands in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet in about three seconds.

You can change the goal or the reward later without reissuing anyone's card, so there is no penalty for starting with this and adjusting once you have real data.