Overview

Our first venture into food truck events. Could almost say this is a what not to do sort of guide for anyone starting outdoor vending! Covering our setup decisions, interactions with the attendees and staff, sales, and lessons that have been learned including what worked well and what could be improved for our next event in August 2025.

Applications, Payments & Planning

I was looking around for other types of events to try and sell at, and if anyone is familiar with Cloris Creates, she does video blogs on Instagram. If I recall correctly, her best events were some sort of food event while her worst events were animal specific ones. I remember wanting to try out a food festival sort of event because of her vlogs, but turns out there are quite a few of those. My husband found a food truck one for me to consider that had three different locations and were all one day events. I ended up emailing them in July 2024 to find out some information and costs. The pricing wasn't terrible - about $224-$275 for a 10x10 space. 

I applied in April 2025 for all three events and was accepted on May 18th, 2025. The email contained all the events I applied for, the dates, locations, hours and costs. I really liked how payment worked for these. In order to secure your spot at each festival, you had to pay a deposit. The remaining fees were due before each event. They were very clear that cancellations within 21 days of the event are non-refundable. That seems fair since they would have to replace you.

So my booth fee was $250 per event (Hopkins, Minneapolis & Anoka), so my total was $750. Since I only had to pay the deposit, I only owed 50% at the time of the email on the 18th. So my amount due was $375 with the remainder to be paid later. I checked my calendar and then paid on May 19th. The invoice included a breakdown for the events

I actually received the Hopkins Food Truck Festival remaining invoice on June 14th, the same day we received the information sharing our locations and load in details. Their preference was for us to come in on Mainstreet and 7th, but I wanted to park near somewhere we'd parked before. My location was TT which was on 10th Ave N. I was like okay I have been here before, where was that restaurant so I know where we can park.

I've eaten at a great place called Thirty Bales before, so I was a little familiar with downtown Hopkins. I don't even remember why we ended up there for lunch, but I got a not-spicy chicken sandwich and it was so good.

The parking garage I wanted to park at was on 11th Ave, the Hopkins Municipal Parking Ramp. It's a lot closer to my location than 7th is. They wanted all vehicles to arrive on time to their load in location, no later than 10:45am. I feel like that's cutting it close since the event is at 11am. Each non-food vendor also had their own load in time. We were only allowed to enter from either 11th Ave and Mainstreet or 7th Ave and Mainstreet because of how they will be directing the food trucks.

My load in time was at 10am, but ideally we'd be there sooner so we can walk all our stuff to the booth. My convention setup takes more time than my local setup, but for this event I wanted to use a convention setup since I have more space. We bring our own tents, chairs, tables, etc. I ordered an Eurmax tent for this event to make sure I wasn't without coverage. We weren't going to be as lucky for this as we were the cat adoption event where a tent was provided for us.

This event is rain or shine, so all we can do is hope for wonderful weather. I paid my final amount for this event on June 15. It was $125, meaning I had time before each event to come up with the remaining amounts if necessary. That's pretty nice if you ask me.

Before the Event & Setup

I want to note how important checking the weather for an event is right here. Our air conditioner, after trying to recharge it, was not really working in the 10 year old WRX and my other car is a convertible that is nearly 20 years old which needs the same thing fixed. Apparently charging it yourself with kits can damage your system over time, so after doing this ourselves for several years in both vehicles it has finally caught up to us. This does matter for how things did end up playing out in the end. Our weather went from raining and severe weather warnings directly into extreme heat warnings. Given the time I had signed up for this, it was not really something we could have known or predicted anyways. We had to schedule the WRX to go in for AC repairs, the soonest was June 20th - so the Friday before the event. They gave us a loaner and we had expected to get the car back later that day, but unfortunately (or fortunately?) they didn't get to it until later. Our loaner was a Subaru Crosstrek which is somehow even lower tech than our 2016 WRX Limited. Whatever, we had a vehicle with working AC for the event on Saturday. I'm a bit of a car snob so don't take anything seriously when I'm being critical of vehicles.

The night before, we made sure to go through what we were bringing and repack it into as few boxes as possible. I always seem to have at least four boxes no matter how much I condense. We also washed some fruit and set that aside for the cooler in the morning. Since it was a food festival, we knew we'd be sharing some of the food from the food trucks. Having fresh fruit for snacks between was really helpful though. We also had Gatorade to bring with, but managed to forget to pack it into the cooler. There are probably better options, just make sure you bring something with electrolytes.

I still had cash from the event on Wednesday, so all I needed to do was make sure I had the bare minimum of grid cubes for my normal convention setup and recharge all my devices. 

We decided last minute on the morning of the event to go buy a cooler to go with the bottled water we were already planning to pick up. We just got a cheap Igloo Wheelie Rolling Cooler (38qt) $30. We wanted something that wasn't huge, had a handle and wheels for easy transport. Coolers can get really expensive, apparently. Shows you how much I really pay attention to things. If this thing doesn't last for what we need it for, maybe we'll get something nicer in the future, but for now it works. We do have a small travel cooler we've had for probably 15 years now, but it did not hold a lot of water bottles. Definitely makes us seem like we didn't have anything planned with how I stated it haha. Hydration is super important and you can never have enough water.

We loaded the car up after our shopping trip. Hopkins is about 40 minutes from us, so we had to make sure we had enough time to get there by 10am. We did stop to pick up two 5 lb bags of ice from the gas station on the way just to make sure we had enough cooling power for the water, fruit and melt for the misting fan. We brought what we could from our freezer, but it was not enough.

The streets were blocked off for this event, as expected, and it was fortunately very easy to find where we were needing to go since the streets are just numbers.

When we arrived, we parked at a barrier on 10th Avenue so I could figure out where I was supposed to be located. I was driving, so I just left my husband in the car with it running. I found the area I was supposed to set up in, but there was clearly not enough space for the amount of vendors they had placed there. I asked people what their booth space was only to find out someone had set up in my spot, TT. The staff didn't make them move. They just had me set up next to the person who took my spot.

Apparently a staff told my husband he'd need to move the vehicle while I was running around trying to locate someone. I ran back to the car to move it to the other side of 10th Ave. We parked in the back of Driskill's parking lot, which had been partially blocked off so we weren't taking their customers spots. We drove past what looked like some sort of farmer's market while figuring out how to get to parking near 10th, so there were already a lot of people out and about despite this event not starting for another hour.

Our parking spot was so close to where we were setting up, so a few trips back and forth were all that were needed before finally starting to set up. I started on the table before my husband grabbed the tent. One of the other vendors came up to me asking about space and I just explained that I wasn't even in my spot and that she'd need to speak with staff about where she should go instead. The police were talking to someone as well about how things needed to be organized and I guess there were probably some other issues that I wasn't aware of. The police were just very adamant they had it under control and the organizer would work with it.

I did not expect setup to take so long. We did a practice run setting the tent up in our driveway. Felt pretty quick and easy. Nothing super difficult, but it did feel like you always needed two people. Even watching others set theirs up made me question how anyone could do this stuff solo. Once our tent was up, I got back to setting up the display while my husband secured the tent with the flat weights and the bags filled with rocks.

We realized nearly immediately that stickers were not going to be a thing at this event. I usually use the nail polish rack with sticker dividers, but this event was far too windy. Stickers would have blown all over the place if we had tried. So ultimately the decision was made not to sell stickers which absolutely impacted sales we could have had. 

Most of our extended setup time involved dealing with so much wind that pins wouldn't even stay on the display. We rotated things so it was less of an issue, but ultimately had to put up one of the walls anyways. I don't know what the best solution to this is just yet, but the one wall where most of the wind was coming from worked for the most part. We did still have to adjust it slightly throughout the day and reattach the top part, but otherwise it did block most of the wind. The downside was that no one could see into our booth either. If they weren't walking down to the Yum Yum food truck, they couldn't even really see us at all from the street. Facing the blue food truck, we were the last tent on the right. 

The Event Itself

The event started before we even finished setting up. We arrived a little after 10am, didn't finish setup until like 11:46ish. So nearly two hours after our scheduled setup time and nearly an hour after the event started. 

After we were finally finished, I went out to sort of see what the foot traffic was looking like and make a walking to my booth kind of TikTok. A ton of people were coming by while we were still messing with what is normally only a 30 minute or less setup. Did we lose out on sales? Potentially. 

Several people came by talking about how they owned corgis and why they didn't bring them along (the heat), and a few people asked me why I didn't bring ours with. It was definitely too hot for anyone to have their pups out.

A majority of the sales I did get happened between noon and 1pm. The rest of the time was nearly dead, with one sale about every two hours. There was a barber shop behind us and people kept standing on the side of our tent or near his window waiting for their stuff from Yum Yum. My husband mentioned when the guy closed up shop around 3pm, he was cursing about why bother even owning a business here when this kinda crap is happening.

Kenny ran and got us a BBQ sandwich to share from Ol Smoky BBQ, which was like just across the way on the other side of 10th Ave. He had them put brisket on it which made it extra good. I don't know that I like this more than 

The wind was blowing heat at us after 1:30pm, so we started using the EGO fan we got specifically for this event. We already have an EGO lawnmower, so we just used that battery with it (they don't just come with batteries apparently) and cooled ourselves down. It worked pretty well for what we needed for a few hours at least.

Around 2pm was when I decided to have some really exciting issues. In order to keep from having heat exhaustion/stroke or getting dehydrated in general, you need to drink water. If you drink water, you pee a lot. My husband was taking a ton of bathroom breaks and I was chilling until I couldn't anymore. He had gone earlier to scope out the grocery store to see if that was an option and they had signs posted that you needed to be a customer to use the bathroom. He bought some Gatorade, used the bathroom and reported back. I decided to go to the porta potties and they were all empty. None of them had toilet paper. I was like cool and decided I was just going to suck it up and wait. Yeah right. I ended up walking to the grocery store, buying some terrible cookies and Doritos and used the bathroom. This was the start of my downfall, honestly.

Since it was also pretty dead in general, I took this time to walk down the way and see what other vendors there were as well as food trucks. It was a lot longer than I think I considered. It stretched all the way down to 7th I believe. There were vendors, food trucks, a bucking bull, a place for beer and a concert stage.

The second time when I went to use the bathrooms later on, some of them were busy and none of the

ones I opened had toilet paper. It was because of this whole problem of being able to just use a bathroom easily I just stopped drinking as much water. I don't know that I was doing it intentionally, but that happened. This lead to the heat exhaustion I ended up dealing with later.

I decided to just drive to the local Holiday gas station in an attempt to not have to spend more money at the grocery store just to pee. I was so happy to find a bathroom I didn't notice it had no toilet paper. Haha. Thankfully there were some paper towels but I think I need to just apparently bring toilet paper to events. 

Got some Vietnamese coffee from Yum Yum - although they told me later I should have gotten it with ice cream. I had originally said I was going to then chickened out and the owner told me his wife adds ice cream to it as their specialty to make it so much better. I adore their little heart shaped straws. 

Forget the name of this place but we had it around 4:36pm. It was hibachi chicken with yum yum sauce. It was so good but the same price as real hibachi haha. You just didn't get all the cool action that goes with the sit down restaurant version. I will say one thing I do really like about food truck events is that you have really good food options. We didn't eat anything that didn't taste good.

I started having heat exhaustion signs after we had eaten. My husband felt fine and had me go sit in the car with the AC on for awhile. I wasn't super thrilled to be feeling so bad and not be able to help at my own booth, but I appreciate the fact he was there for me. I have no idea what I would have done if I had tried to do this sort of event by myself or even with just our daughter like I have done with other events. 

I did walk over to the grocery store and bought some Gatorade. I probably sat in the vehicle for like 30-40 minutes, until I was feeling better before I finally made my way back to my booth around 7pm. It's really boring to sit in a car to cool down and feel better for so long, but I am glad I did. I still had a slight headache, but overall, I felt a lot better.

Had some chicken strips from Bad Rooster around 7:31pm when I was feeling mostly better. Their cluck sauce was like a more spicy Raising Cane's sauce, but I liked their honey BBQ sauce better. I had actually taken a picture of their sign with sauces earlier in the day, too so that worked out for sharing what sauces they had on hand.

Tom, the organizer, came and apologized to us about the whole event. I think the heat really made it so people weren't interested in coming out at all, and I honestly don't blame them. Twin Cities Pride plus the Back to the 50s Car Show and Hobby Clash were all happening the same weekend. Crowds had other things they could attend that were all rather large events, one of which was at least inside. I know people said they attended yearly, so I do hope the August events go better. I am not going to be showing up if it's another 100+ degree day. 

Him chatting with us made us decide not to actually pack up early and leave around 7pm. The Yum Yum truck owner brought us a free lemonade as well, which was great. Chatted with us for a bit and even asked us about our fan since it misted him when he turned around after giving us the lemonade. Everyone was seriously suffering from the heat. It's pretty game changing to be able to throw the line into the cooler for the drinks since the ice was melting throughout the day and just have it blown onto us to cool us down. 10/10, highly recommend. I do think that the fan died about an hour before the event ended or something. We ran it on high/turbo basically the whole time, and it was oscillating as well for some portion of the event.

Around 8pm though, I did start slowly packing stuff up and my husband started the tent teardown. It took nearly the whole hour to get everything mostly put away without fully breaking down. We also made two final sales during the breakdown process, so I broke even at the very end. I think there were a lot of people who had shown up for the concert and to drink beer. There were some kids, but it definitely looked more like a drinking crowd by this point in the evening than a shopping crowd.  

I did overexert myself a little bit, so my husband had to take over driving when we stopped to grab a burger for my daughter to have. I was not fully recovered from the heat exhaustion I guess.

What Worked & What Did Not

Expected location wasn't guaranteed. They didn't seem to care that much where vendors were actually were versus where we were told we would be. Looking back at the map, the tables were basically side by side instead of blocking out what should be 10x10 spaces. This lead to problems of there not being enough space for everyone to be there despite expecting to be.

Parking was free, so this was a perk honestly. I love free parking for me and everyone else. Our spot was directly next to where our street was too, so it was extremely convenient. Definitely not where I had expected to park originally, but this actually worked out quite nicely in the end.

I was extremely underprepared for the wind knocking all of the stuff off my display whenever it pleased. We did have a tent wall and threw that up at least, but the wind still had enough force to shove that wall into the table without warning. We moved the table over more, but there has to be a better solution to this. Either a display change or not using walls.

Not enough weights. Apparently even though we felt like we had a lot of weight, we needed more. Even other vendors were borrowing weights from each other, so we weren't the only ones that were in this situation. We had enough, thankfully, to make do, but we will be getting more before the next food truck festival.

Load in & out felt kind of annoying. There was no way to easily park near where we wanted our things to be. That means anyone with heavy things had to find a way to haul stuff. Guess if you're disabled, doing these events would be extremely difficult.

Extreme heat. This impacted sales for everyone around us. I can't even really know how well the event would have gone otherwise. I was lucky to break even, even if it was barely.

Lack of toilet paper. Yeah, I'm a diva. I really never considered the bathroom situation too much, but local businesses did not want anyone not shopping there to even enter their building. I think this is the normal bathroom situation for outdoor events or something, but we'll see. I don't have a lot of experience and can't say this was particularly great haha.

My custom hooks for conventions were bending from the combination of weight and the heat. We use PETG, which is more heat tolerant, for the sticker dividers. These were printed with PLA, so between the weight of certain pins (I have some seriously heavy pins), the sun beating on them at certain times of day, not all of them held up. Changing the design will help with both the wind and the heat, so at least that is on the to do list.

Conclusion

I barely broke even so while the event wasn't a super success, it wasn't a complete loss either. The event felt like it should have been much better had the heat not been a factor, but it really opened my eyes on what sort of things I will be encountering at outdoor events. It wasn't a waste since the lessons learned were extremely valuable. We definitely felt prepared and Minnesota weather wanted to make sure we knew we were still not as prepared as we could be. I have two more food truck events in August, so hopefully we'll have a more accurate gauge as to whether this is normal or not.

The Details (TLDR)

Event	Hopkins Food Truck Festival 2025
Date	June 21, 2025
Location	Downtown Hopkins, 902 Mainstreet, Hopkins, MN 55343
Hours	11am-9pm CST
Total Vendors	47 food trucks & 54 non-food vendors
Attendance	~2,000
Travelworthy	No, this is really only going to be of any value to certain local vendors within a 30 minute drive range.
Booth Cost	$250 for a 10ft by 10ft space
Total Sales	$277.50 (this is before all costs are taken out)
Transaction Fees	$6.43
Taxes	$20.14
Total Profit	$0.93