Month One Paid ¥400/Hour: A Food Truck's Full 4-Month P&L, Then COVID Stopped Everything
Real month-by-month data from a food truck's first 4 months. Month one: 8 days of vending, ¥64K in sales, ¥28K in profit (¥400/hour by the owner's own math). By month four, sales had improved to ¥384K with ¥334K in profit. Best single day: ¥50K. Then, in month five, COVID wiped out every vending spot — a rare public record capturing both the ramp-up and the fragility.
This is a translation of the Japanese original. The Japanese version and cited primary sources are authoritative for all figures.
The month-by-month data
| Month | Sales | Profit | Vending days |
|---|---|---|---|
| December (opening) | ¥63,500 | ¥28,275 | 8 days |
| January | ¥273,780 | ¥165,280 | 17 days |
| February | ¥424,370 | ¥309,520 | 17 days |
| March | ¥383,650 | ¥333,828 | 16 days |
- Best single-day sales: ¥50,800 (Michi-no-Eki Motegi — 87 units sold in about 4 hours)
- Cost structure: pitch fees around 15% of sales, ingredients 25–30%, vehicle loan ¥54,000/month
- Month five: COVID eliminated events and vending locations; operations suspended
Reading between the numbers
The owner summed up month one like this: “¥28K in profit. That’s ¥3,500 a day — about ¥400 an hour.” What multiplied profit twelvefold over the following three months was not menu efficiency but cultivating better vending locations. Whether you can secure high-footfall spots like roadside stations determines your daily sales, and that takes an accumulation of track record and trust.
And then, right after month four delivered ¥330K in profit, an external factor (COVID) halted the business itself. The fixed costs — a ¥54K monthly vehicle loan — keep flowing out even when you cannot vend.
What this case teaches
An offline business’s ramp-up is determined by its location-acquisition curve. The cooking and the product were essentially the same, yet profit differed twelvefold between December and March. Real skill in mobile food vending turned out to be not culinary — it was the salesmanship and relationships needed to win good vending slots.
A flow-income business with fixed costs is the most vulnerable to external shocks. In contrast to stock photos that kept paying ¥50K a year untouched, a food truck drops to zero the moment you or the market stops — and the loan payments remain. It is an even more extreme form of resale arbitrage’s “sales fall in any month you can’t move”.
Even so, initial investment stayed in the low millions of yen, and monthly profit reached ¥330K within 4 months. Compared with opening a restaurant (where interior work alone runs into the millions), the risk really is smaller — and the numbers back up the value of that “start small” approach.
Related reading
Sources
This article summarizes and analyzes the public sources above. Please refer to the primary sources for details.