Your truck moves. Your ordering address should not. Zayos gives you a permanent one.
Zayos gives a Tampa food truck its own ordering site, pre-order pickup windows for each stop, QR ordering at the window and catering with lead times, for a flat $499 a month. The guest pays $0.99 on a pickup order. You keep 100 percent of food revenue and tips.
Free. About 60 seconds. No card.
Why does a delivery app fit a food truck so badly?
Four reasons, and none of them are about the fee. The fee is the argument for a restaurant. For a truck the mismatch is structural.
- 01
A marketplace listing has one address. A truck has a different one every day.
The whole discovery model is built on a fixed pin and a delivery radius drawn around it. You are a moving pin, so the model either breaks or you spend your life editing an address.
- 02
Delivery is not the problem you have.
A brick and mortar kitchen wants somebody to carry food to a house. You want the sixty people standing on a brewery lawn to stop standing.
- 03
Your service window is 90 minutes, not 10 hours.
Marketplaces smooth demand across a long day. A truck lives or dies inside one rush, and an order that arrives 20 minutes after you pull out is not revenue, it is a refund.
- 04
The money is in catering, and the apps do not do catering.
A private event, a wedding, an office park lunch or a corporate campus booking is a four figure day. That order needs a date, a headcount, a lead time and a deposit, not a checkout button.
What is a 20 minute line actually costing me on a brewery night?
More than any commission you have ever paid. A truck at a busy stop is not limited by demand and it is usually not limited by the grill either. It is limited by one human being taking one order at a time through one window, while everybody else decides whether to keep waiting.
- A 90 minute brewery rush is 5,400 seconds of window time
- Taking an order face to face, with questions and payment, at 150 seconds each = about 36 orders
- Handing over a bag that was already ordered and paid for, at about 40 seconds = the window clears 135
- So pre-ordering does not make the window faster, it takes the window out of the equation and moves the ceiling onto the flat top, where it belongs
A model of one window at the timings shown, not a promise about your sales. Your real ceiling becomes cook time. Change the seconds and the answer changes.
A food truck loses far more money to the customer who sees the line and walks to the taco truck beside it than it will ever lose to a delivery commission.
The QR code is what closes that gap. It goes on the truck, the menu board, the A frame and your social bio, so the person who just joined the line orders from their phone while they are still in the beer queue. Same rush, same crew, more tickets. That is the same QR ordering setup a dining room uses at the table, pointed at a lawn instead.
Where do I put my address when I do not have one?
On your own site, which stops moving even when you do not. Your domain becomes the fixed point: it holds the menu, the schedule of where you will be, the catering form and the ordering itself. Each stop is a pickup window you open when you park and close when you pull out, so nothing can be ordered for a place you have already left.
This is also how a truck stops depending on somebody else's audience. Every follower you gain on a platform is rented, and every diner a marketplace sends you belongs to the marketplace. The people who order on your own site land in a customer list with their phone number and their order history, and you can tell them where you will be on Thursday without paying anybody for permission.
A food truck's most valuable asset is not the truck, it is the list of people who will drive across Tampa to find it.
What does a Tampa truck year actually look like?
Lopsided. Tampa gives a truck a long comfortable outdoor season, a handful of enormous event weeks, and a summer that punishes anybody whose entire business is a folding table on hot asphalt.
| When | What is on | What it means for the truck |
|---|---|---|
| October to April | Patio and brewery season. Weeknight stops in Seminole Heights, Ybor and Tampa Heights are actually pleasant to stand around in. | Your bread and butter. Repeat stops with a crowd that comes back, which is exactly the crowd worth owning directly. |
| Late January | Gasparilla, the pirate parade on Bayshore Boulevard, one of the largest parades in the country. | A single enormous day with street closures and permitted vending. Pre-order is the only thing that keeps a window moving in that crowd. |
| February to March | Florida State Fair in Tampa, the Strawberry Festival in Plant City, and Yankees spring training at Steinbrenner Field. | Six weeks where the whole region eats outdoors. This is when a truck books the events that pay for the summer. |
| June to September | Heat, humidity and a thunderstorm most afternoons. The outdoor weeknight stop quietly dies. | Catering and commissary work carry the summer. A customer list you own is how you sell into it. |
| June 1 to November 30 | Hurricane season, peaking August through October. Tampa Bay took direct disruption from Helene and then Milton in 2024. | After a storm a truck with fuel and water is sometimes the only kitchen running on a block. Your own site lets you post a location and open ordering the same hour. |
Event windows are the published Tampa Bay calendar, not a claim about your bookings. Vending at any of these events is arranged with the organizer, not with us.
Which part of this actually pays for a Tampa summer?
Catering, and it is not close. A wedding, an office park lunch, a construction site feed, a birthday in a backyard in Carrollwood. One booked event can be worth a week of brewery nights, and it is completely immune to whether it rained at six.
The problem is that most trucks take those bookings through direct messages and a phone number in a bio, which means the enquiry arrives at 11pm on a Saturday, gets read on Monday, and half of them are gone. A catering order type with a date, a headcount, a lead time and a deposit turns that into a booking while the person still wants it. The guest pays the 10 percent catering fee, and you never do. The catering setup covers how the form and the lead times work, and the food truck build covers the rest.
Is a flat $499 a month the right shape for a truck?
Only if it earns it, and for a truck it earns it in a different place than it does for a restaurant. If almost all of your money comes across the window in person, you are not paying much commission today, so the honest case for Zayos is throughput, catering and owning the customer list, not commission you are not being charged. If you also run the delivery apps, the comparison is straightforward: 300 app orders a month at a $14 ticket is $4,200 of volume, and 28 percent blended on that is about $1,176 a month against a flat $499.
Operator is $499 a month, Operator + Marketplace is $599 and adds Otter ingestion so any app tickets land on the same tablet, and Concierge is $699 with up to five virtual brands out of one kitchen, which is how a commissary can run more than one concept off a single line. Everything is month to month, no setup fee, no commission at any volume. See pricing, the fee breakdown and how it works.
Is there a Tampa truck on Zayos I can go look at?
No. Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale company, and we serve Tampa from South Florida. The operator live and taking orders today is Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, which keeps $48k+/yr that used to leave as marketplace commission at roughly 3,000 orders a month. Seven more storefronts are built and open ordering at their own launch dates.
The thing we can commit to is the timeline rather than a Tampa reference: most operators are live in under 2 weeks, with a first direct order usually inside the first week.
Questions Tampa truck operators ask.
My truck is somewhere different every day. What address does the ordering site use?
Can somebody order Sunday night for a Tuesday brewery stop?
Is $499 a month too much for a food truck?
What happens if I break down or the stop gets cancelled?
Do I need delivery at all?
How does catering actually work?
Do you take a cut of the tips, and is there a Tampa truck already on Zayos?
See the number before you decide.
The free report uses your real order count and average ticket, and tells you plainly whether a flat monthly fee beats what you are paying now.