Waffle Business Plan: A Waffle Trailer's First Year

A waffle business keeps an unusual share of each sale. A Liège waffle, the dense Belgian kind with pearl sugar baked in, costs about 95 cents to make, dough, paper sleeve and card fee, and sells for $7. Toppings and savory plates raise the ticket: strawberries and cream take it to $10, and chicken and waffles to $14, at a lower margin. Private events, a hundred waffles for a wedding or an office party, bring a big ticket in one booking. What decides the plan is the other side: the trailer and its fryer, the commissary it has to return to, the helper you need on a busy night, and the market and event fees that come before any waffle is sold. The plan below works per waffle. In the example, a Memphis waffle trailer starts with $76,000, ends its first year about $11,000 ahead before the owner's pay, and makes about $4,900 a month at full speed. Below is each part of the plan, the first year month by month, the startup budget, and a free template.

The short version

• Describe the business in a paragraph: where you'll park, who buys, what's missing nearby, the goals.
• Cost each waffle: dough by the gram, the sleeve or box, toppings, the card fee.
• Plan sales by product: plain, topped, savory, drinks and private events.
• Market and event fees and a helper's wages are the fixed costs that decide the month.
• Budget working cash for the slow first months, and check it against the lowest cash point.
• Events book weeks ahead; a few a month steady the cash.
• TaroStack makes each waffle a recipe, so its true cost follows the price of butter and pearl sugar. More below.

Part 1: the business description

Bluff City Waffle Co., a made-up waffle trailer in Memphis, Tennessee, writes:

Bluff City Waffle Co. is a waffle trailer serving Liège waffles, plain and with toppings, chicken and waffles, and coffee at Saturday markets, brewery nights and downtown lunches, and catering private events with a waffle bar. It works from a licensed commissary kitchen. In its first year it aims to reach $18,000 of sales a month.

Part 2: what a waffle costs

A waffle is 110 grams of dough: flour, 25 grams of butter, 20 grams of Belgian pearl sugar, egg, milk and yeast. Butter and pearl sugar are seven-tenths of the dough's cost, so a jump in butter shows up on every waffle. The chicken is a fried thigh with hot honey. What a trailer counts each week is in food truck inventory spreadsheet.

Part 3: customers and schedule

The trailer works about 25 days a month: Saturday and Sunday markets, three brewery nights a week, weekday lunches downtown and private events. Toppings outsell plain waffles; chicken and waffles carry the evenings. A private event is 100 waffles with a toppings bar for $950, and costs $260 in dough, toppings, paper, a helper's extra hours and travel.

Part 4: what each product earns

At full speed the trailer sells $18,100 a month and keeps $14,262.50, 78.8%; topped waffles bring $5,705 of it.

Part 5: the first year, month by month

Fixed costs are $9,330 every month: the commissary ($800), wages for one helper ($5,000), propane and generator fuel ($450), insurance ($250), market and event fees ($1,500), trailer upkeep ($700), the register and software ($80), ads ($250), and other costs ($300). Sales start at 35% of full speed:

The year's sales are $156,055, and the trailer ends it $10,998 ahead, before the owner's pay. It breaks even at about $11,840 of sales a month, in the sixth month. The lowest cash point, −$11,924 in month 5, is covered by the $15,000 of working cash with about $3,000 to spare. A cold or rainy month cuts market sales, which is where the event bookings earn their place: three events a month bring $2,070 of contribution whatever the weather.

Part 6: the startup budget

The $61,000 before working cash is earned back in about a year at full speed. The permits a trailer needs are in food truck license, and a wider look at mobile food in food truck business plan.

Get the template

Download the waffle business plan workbook. Four sheets: your products, each with its price, variable cost and units a month at full speed; the first year, month by month, with sales ramping up, profit, cash, the first profitable month, the lowest cash point and whether the working cash covers it; your fixed costs; and the startup budget. It's an ordinary Excel file with no macros, and it works in Google Sheets, LibreOffice and Numbers.

Where this stops working

The plan uses one cost a waffle. The trailer uses a different one each month: butter prices move, a batch of dough gets thrown out when a market rains off, and the pearl sugar order is short because nobody counted what was left after the last event.

How TaroStack does it

TaroStack makes each waffle a recipe, so its true cost follows the price of butter and pearl sugar.

Waffles as recipes. A waffle is a recipe by weight: 110 grams of dough with its flour, butter, pearl sugar and egg, plus the sleeve, so its cost moves when butter does.

Dough as a batch. Each morning's dough is a batch from its recipe, and dough thrown out is recorded as waste with a reason.

Counts with no signal. The trailer and the commissary shelf can be counted on a phone with no signal, and the reorder list shows butter, pearl sugar and sleeves in days of cover.

Recipes, batches, counts and the reorder list are on every plan, from $49 a month. The first 30 days are free, with no credit card. If you'd like a hand setting up, ask, and we'll do it with you.

Questions people also ask

How much does it cost to start a waffle business?

The example's trailer budgets $76,000, including $15,000 of working cash; the built-out trailer is $45,000 of it.

Is a waffle business profitable?

It can be: the example makes about $4,900 a month at full speed before the owner's pay, and ends its first year ahead.

How much does a Liège waffle cost to make?

In the example, about 95 cents: 66 cents of dough, the paper sleeve and the card fee.

What sells best at a waffle stand?

In the example, waffles with toppings: 700 a month at full speed, $5,705 of the trailer's contribution.