Food Trucks and Calendars

As an owner of a food truck, you need to schedule your truck.  You can do this the old way, by using a day planner and writing it down , then communicate the schedule to your team members verbally.  This works but there are better and easier ways now. This story talks about why using Google calendar for your food truck scheduler is the best way.

I've looked at a lot of food truck websites. Some will have food truck calendars, some don't.  It appears there are two reasons for lack of a calendar: 1)  there is no calendar for the truck in a form that can be used for a website; 2) it simply has not been included in the website.

Fixing problem 1 is easy.  There are a bunch of software tools that work with websites to import calendars.  Typically the website hosting service will have their own tools.  There are many free online calendars as well.  They all work, and can make pretty calendars for your website. Problem 2 appears to be a choice.  I can only guess why a food truck owner would not include a calendar/schedule on their website.  Either it's too time consuming for them to maintain on the website, or they have no public events.  If you have a truck with no public events, then you don't need a public  calendar.  If you do, then you should have a calendar.  If you have to go into the website to update your calendar and or website, then you have the wrong calendar.  Get a simple online calendar and you should be able to update your website calendar from you mobile phone or PC no problem. No logins, no messing with the website and its content management system, just update your calendar.   It is something you have to do anyway just to maintain your business, so there is no extra work for you to update your website.

The online calendar you should use is Google calendar. There are many reasons: it's free, easy to work with, works on any device, imports easily to any website without any coding,  and many other reasons.  The most important reason, however, is that it is completely SHAREABLE!    I get annoyed when I go into a food truck website and find that I have either no way of getting access to their schedule without manually writing down their calendar events, or better but still dumb, downloading their schedule.  Downloading the schedule does nothing for me. The schedule can change at any time, so I would have to keep going back and downloading it.   

If you use Google calendar, then with one click your calendar can be shared with any other Google calendar.  Any time the truck owner changes their schedule, then all the shared calendars get updated as well.  This feature alone makes it silly to use another online calendar for your public events.  But theres's more.  Google calendar makes it easy for web gurus to access the raw data behind the  calendar and distribute it throughout the Internet, usually by social media.  This will give greater awareness to your public events, which is what you want.

So how do you get a Google calendar?  You need a Google account.  You can get one of those here.  Once you have an account, you will have access to tons of Google applications including Google calendar.  The calendar itself is very intuitive. Remember to include the address of each of your calendar events so it can be mapped. Google calendar makes this easy to do. If you are having problems whatsoever with the calendar, Google has tons of tutorials and documents. You can "Google" almost any problem, issue, or question.  If you are still having issues, send an email to support@foodtruckconnector.com and we will help you out.

Good luck with your calendar!  I hope it helps your truck's business.

Thanks, Mark