◆ Online ordering for food trucks

Your 20-minute line is leaving with full pockets. Preorder ahead. Skip the line. Eat with friends.

Food trucks live and die on line-skipping value, event-based catering, and location-of-the-week dynamics. Zay-OS is commission-free preorder ordering with geo-fenced windows, brewery-stop scheduling, event-catering inquiries, and rally-night batching. $499/month flat. Live at Naya Grill today.

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Quick answer

Zay-OS is commission-free preorder online ordering built for food trucks. It handles geo-fenced ordering windows so customers can only order when the truck is parked, stop-of-the-week scheduling, event-catering inquiries, brewery partnership revenue splits, and truck-rally batching. Customers preorder, skip the line, and eat with their friends instead of waiting.

Food-truck specific

What a food truck actually needs from an ordering platform.

Geo-fenced ordering windows

Your storefront only accepts orders when the truck is parked at a known stop. Set a polygon around tonight's brewery, open the order window at 5pm, close it at 8:45pm. No one orders a burger at 2am for pickup at a location you are not at.

Stop-of-the-week scheduling

Configure the week's parking schedule in advance — Monday office park, Tuesday brewery, Wednesday closed, Thursday craft fair, Friday rally night. The storefront surfaces the next two confirmed stops at the top of the page.

Twitter / Instagram location loop

Auto-generate the "we're at X tonight, order ahead here" share card with the menu link, ready to copy into Twitter/Instagram stories the moment you park.

Skip-the-line preorder

Customer pays in the app, picks a 5-minute pickup window, walks past the line, hands over a confirmation number. The window person sees the order in the queue color-coded ahead of walk-ups.

Event-catering inquiry flow

Wedding, corporate office lunch, festival booth — each gets a custom inquiry form on the site. Captures date, headcount, dietary needs, location, budget range. Routes to the operator email as a structured lead.

Brewery / venue partnership splits

Configurable revenue split with the brewery that hosts you Friday nights. The platform routes the partner's percentage automatically and shows the brewery a real-time order count for their bar staffing.

Truck-rally batching

When you park at a food-truck rally with 6 other trucks, your direct-order channel still works. The storefront shows your truck specifically, the pickup window points to your truck position at the rally, and walk-up customers see a "no line — order ahead" QR on the truck.

Mobile-first ordering site

Truck customers order from a phone in line, in the parking lot, in the brewery beer garden. The storefront loads in under 2 seconds, mobile keyboard works, payment is one tap with Apple Pay / Google Pay.

No-show alert

Customer ordered a preorder for 7pm pickup and has not shown up by 7:25pm. The kitchen tablet flashes the order — choose to call them, refund and 86 the food, or hold for late pickup. Stops the half-prepped order from becoming wasted inventory.

Marketplace ingest via Otter when applicable

Food trucks that also list on DoorDash for office-park lunch days get those orders ingested into the same kitchen tablet. One queue at the prep window — direct preorders, walk-ups, marketplace orders all in one flow.

The food-truck operational reality

Location moves. Time windows are tight. Catering is the real revenue.

Food trucks operate on a model that almost no restaurant ordering software was built for. The location changes day to day — Tuesday brewery, Wednesday office park, Thursday craft fair, Friday rally night. The active service window at each stop is 3-4 hours, not a 12-hour day. And the highest-revenue piece of the business is often not the truck itself but the event-catering pipeline that flows from the weekend stops — corporate office lunches, weddings, festivals.

The result is that most food trucks bolt an ordering page onto a Square or generic website that does not know where the truck is parked, does not gate orders to the active window, and does not capture event-catering inquiries cleanly. Customers place pickup orders for "the brewery" on a night the truck is somewhere else. Catering leads come in as a generic contact-form email that takes the operator three days to answer. And the line-skipping value that drives 20-30% of evening revenue at a busy stop never materializes because nobody knows the preorder option exists.

Zay-OS is built around the moving-truck reality. Stops are first-class objects on the schedule — set the polygon, set the time window, set the pickup point, and the order page lights up only when that window is active. Customers see the next two confirmed stops at the top of the storefront. The brewery-night QR on the truck side opens the order page already pointing at tonight\'s stop. Catering inquiries route to a structured lead form. Cancellation refunds an entire stop\'s worth of orders in one tap when the truck breaks down. And the kitchen tablet at the prep window shows preorders, walk-ups, and marketplace orders (for the office-park DoorDash days) all in one queue.

Imagine your food truck running on Zay-OS

Naya Grill — already live. Your truck next.

Naya Grill is a Lebanese fast-casual brand running two FL locations on Zay-OS. The same preorder queue, modifier engine, and one-tablet workflow apply to a food truck — with geo-fenced ordering windows and stop scheduling layered on top for the moving-location reality.

7
stops/week supported
0%
on direct orders
1
prep-window tablet
$2.99
diner fee per order
Food-truck flat pricing

$499/month per truck. Same price whether you do 2 stops or 20.

Operator is $499/month per truck. Operator + Marketplace (Otter-ingested DoorDash for office-park lunch days) is $599. Multi-truck operators on Concierge get up to 5 trucks at $699/month flat. The diner pays a $2.99 per-order fee — the truck keeps 100% of food revenue.

Full pricing breakdown →
Food-truck operator questions

Asked by truck operators we have talked to.

How is online ordering different for a food truck than a brick-and-mortar restaurant?
Three things. First, location changes — the truck is at the brewery Tuesday and the office park Wednesday, so the storefront has to know where to take orders for and when. Second, time windows are tight — the truck is parked from 5pm-9pm at a single stop, not open 11am-10pm. Third, event catering is a bigger revenue line than for most restaurants — weddings, corporate, festivals account for 30-50% of annual revenue for an active truck.
What does the geo-fenced ordering window actually prevent?
It prevents a customer from placing a 6pm dinner order on Wednesday when the truck is closed Wednesday — and it prevents a customer from ordering for "pickup at the brewery" when the truck moved to a different stop. The order form is only live during the confirmed window for the confirmed stop. Outside that window, customers see "next stop: Thursday 5pm at [venue] — order ahead opens 2 hours before."
Can I preorder Tuesday's brewery stop on Sunday night?
Yes. The order window opens at a configurable lead time — default 4 hours before the stop. Brewery regulars often preorder Tuesday afternoon during work for a guaranteed dinner pickup at 6pm. They walk up at 6:02, hand over a confirmation, skip the 20-minute line, eat with their friends.
How does the event-catering inquiry flow work?
A custom inquiry form lives on the storefront with the fields trucks actually need: event type (wedding/corporate/festival/private), date, headcount (10-50, 50-150, 150-500, 500+), service style (truck on-site / delivery only / pickup only), dietary requirements, budget tier, contact phone. It routes as a structured email or to a CRM lead pipeline so the operator can quote within an hour instead of playing phone tag for three days.
What about food-truck rallies and festival stops?
Rally and festival stops work the same way as a regular stop — set the polygon, set the window, set the pickup point. Even though there are six other trucks at the rally, your direct-order channel still points specifically to your truck. Walk-up customers waiting in your line see a QR on the truck side that says "Skip the line — order ahead" and the same preorder flow opens.
Does the brewery partnership revenue split actually route money to the brewery?
The platform tracks the revenue split (typically 10-15% to the brewery for hosting). Payouts can be configured to route the brewery's share directly via Stripe Connect, or to hold and pay the brewery monthly via a settlement statement. Most food-truck operators prefer the monthly statement so the brewery sees the full month's volume in one place.
Is $499/month worth it for a food truck doing $20-40k/month?
A food truck doing 800 orders/month at a $18 average ticket pays roughly $4,300/month in marketplace commission at a 30% rate (when they use DoorDash for office-park days). Even setting marketplace commission aside, the preorder skip-the-line conversion adds 15-25% to evening revenue for an active brewery-stop truck — because customers who would have left the line after 15 minutes now order ahead and stay. The platform pays for itself on volume alone.
What happens when a customer pays for a 7pm preorder and the truck breaks down?
One-tap cancel-and-refund from the kitchen tablet. The system auto-emails every affected order, refunds in full, and posts a notice to the storefront ("Tonight's stop cancelled — full refunds processed — next stop Thursday"). The operator does not have to call 30 angry customers.
Keep reading
For catering →
Trucks are catering businesses with wheels.
For cafes →
Coffee carts use the same workflow.
Zay-OS vs GetSauce →
Direct-ordering platform comparison.
Also: restaurant online ordering 101 · how it works · integrations · pricing

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