The First Month Paid ¥400 an Hour. A Food Truck's Full 4-Month Revenue Disclosure — and the Month 5 COVID Shutdown

The Real Monthly Numbers

Month	Sales	Profit	Vending Days
December (launch)	¥63,500	¥28,275	8 days
January	¥273,780	¥165,280	17 days
February	¥424,370	¥309,520	17 days
March	¥383,650	¥333,828	16 days

Best single-day sales: ¥50,800 (at Michi-no-Eki Motegi — 87 items sold in about 4 hours)
Cost structure: pitch fees around 15% of sales, cost of goods 25–30%, vehicle loan ¥54,000/month
Month 5: COVID eliminated events and vending locations; the business went on hiatus

Reading Behind the Numbers

The owner summed up the first month like this: “Profit of ¥28,000. That’s ¥3,500 a day — about ¥400 an hour.” The factor that multiplied profit 12x over the following three months wasn’t menu efficiency but securing better vending locations. Whether you can lock down high-traffic spots like roadside stations determines your daily sales, and that requires accumulating a track record and trust.

And then, right after month four delivered ¥330,000 in profit, an external factor (COVID) stopped the business entirely. Fixed costs (the ¥54,000/month vehicle loan) keep flowing out even when you can’t vend.

What This Case Teaches

The ramp-up of an offline business is determined by its “location acquisition curve.” The skills and product were essentially the same, yet profit differed 12x between December and March. The real competency in mobile food vending turned out to be not cooking, but the salesmanship and relationships needed to win good vending slots.

A flow-based structure with fixed costs is the most vulnerable to external shocks. In contrast to the stock photo business that kept earning ¥50,000 a year on autopilot, a food truck drops to zero the moment you or the market stops — leaving only the loan behind. It is an even more extreme version of the reselling case where “a month you can’t move is a month sales fall”.

Even so, the initial investment stayed in the low millions of yen, and monthly profit of ¥330,000 was reached in just 4 months. Compared with opening a restaurant (where interior work alone runs into the millions), the risk really is smaller — and the numbers back up the value of “starting small.”

Designing for “Money That Keeps Flowing Out Even When You Stop”

The heaviest number in this case is neither sales nor profit but the ¥54,000 monthly vehicle loan. It goes out even in months with no vending. While you’re making ¥330,000 a month it’s a rounding error, but in a zero-revenue month it becomes a fixed outflow on par with living expenses.

When starting an offline business small, the question to examine before “will it make money?” is “what remains when it stops?” For a food truck the structure is: (1) the vehicle can be sold on the used market (not a complete sunk cost), (2) the operating permit, vending track record, and relationships with venues carry over when you restart, (3) but the loan remains as outstanding debt. Estimate your initial investment not as “the amount you could lose” but as “the monthly burden when things stop” — that’s how to measure this type of business’s risk accurately.

The Value of Publishing These Numbers

Information about opening a food business tends to come from parties “selling the dream” (franchise headquarters, vehicle dealers), and financial plans assuming profitability from month one circulate widely. Real-world data like this — “my first month paid ¥400 an hour” — is primary-source information at the opposite pole. Including the 12x profit improvement curve over three months, the first thing anyone considering this business should read is not a success story’s bragging or a vendor’s projections, but a monthly ledger like this one.