Fast Food On Wheels

CP Food Truck, Matrz, Chopsticks, Yummilicious, Izza Wrap, HM Food, Petuk, Food Street, Spaghetti Wheels, Munchies Republic, Hot Box, Deluxe Street Food, Bon Appetit, and the list never ends! Dhaka has become the new core of the food cart business. These are most often found in Gulshan and Banani, but now the trend is spread into the Dhanmondi area as well. So what is so special about food carts? Well apart from the delicious taste and convenience on the streets, it is a very profitable business if managed perceptively.

Secrets Of The Trade

I talked with Nadvie Ahmed, Managing Director at The Cart Company. Nadvie used to have a food cart of his own before he joined The Cart Company. He gave us the inside scoop on the business management side of food carts.
Investment
To start up a food cart business you need to have an initial investment of only about Taka 50,000 Taka. This becomes seriously easy if some friends get together and take the initiative. But if you want to open up in style, with premium service and settings, then it takes around a whopping Taka 1.5-2 lakhs, that too only in the beginning.
Expenses
Normally food carts do not have expenses typical to those of a restaurant. Because you are not running your business in a fixed plot of land, there is no space rent; you are doing your business on the streets, which is basically public property. (However, there is a flipside to this, which we'll get to later.) So it's mainly down to the wages for your employees. It takes a maximum of three employees to manage your average popular and busy food cart. Even if you pay each of them Taka 8,000 monthly, you are running up an expense of Taka 24,000, which is actually just a small portion of the revenue you are going to make over the month. Apart from these there are just normal expenses related to supplies.
Revenue
Nadvie Ahmed tells us that even if you sell your minimum you will get a daily revenue of Taka 2,500 if everything goes alright, which is at the end of the month somewhere around Taka 75,000. If business is going alright, you will earn an average of Taka 4,000 daily from your food cart. And if you manage to achieve sales around Taka 10,000, you will be making a minimum profit margin of 33%. That is exactly how high the returns from the food cart business are, says Nadvie. But with all the returns there are higher risks involved in this business.

Survival

When I asked Hasnain why it's hard to sustain the food cart business, he said, “It's easy to start because the start-up cost is not high. But there are a few reasons why it's difficult to survive: first, since it's a cart, there can be objections from the neighbourhood to where you set up your cart; second, if you can't maintain your quality, you will start to lose your customers; third, even though it's a relatively new market, you can't be making the same product as everyone else.” Which brings us to the challenges in running this business.

What are the challenges?
Nadvie Ahmed got into great detail with this question. First of all, the food is being sold on the streets. So, you are basically not renting the place. That means you are using public property for your business purposes. For staying on the streets you need to pay different sets of people. You need to pay the police, the city corporation, and any other political leaders who are raising subscriptions. Secondly, you cannot move with your kitchen. So, you need to stay at a place from where you can get back to your main kitchen conveniently.  Thirdly, you need to put in time into the business. You need to be always informed about its location and its activities and act sharply whenever there is a setback. And in the end, your cart might be in one location today, but tomorrow it might not be there for one reason or another. And if your customers don't find you there the next day, they will go to the next place that's close by. The high competition and increasing saturation in this market are also some of the challenges of this business.

In the end, the food cart business is without a doubt one of the better things that have happened to us. In the midst of busy schedules and exhausting traffic, food carts can be a big relief. Quite the hopeful, Hasnain says, “Previously, especially in our country, hygienic street food of good quality was not available. Now it is and at a very reasonable price without compromising quality. This sector has definitely helped a lot of the youth like us to take a step forward and start his or her own business. Even though the percentage might be very small, but the entire food cart industry is helping to decrease unemployment, create jobs and expand an emerging market, to some extent.”