This reminds me of a similar article I once read: "I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life."
https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nigh...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2005/12/my-coffeehouse-nigh...
Anyone who has worked in food service in any way knows that it's brutal. Liking a thing, coffee, coffee shops, or anything ... very much does not mean you'd like making it / running something making that thing.
Personally I like video games ... I code web boring apps... for reasons.
> More than 60% of restaurants featured on the show "Kitchen Nightmares" are now closed, according to Grub Street New York, which did the math. Approximately 30% of those kitchens closed within one year of their episode's air date.
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/many-restaurants-on-kitchen-...
Form validation though, after 20 years ... urgh
I live in a big house out in the country on top of a hill. Pretty much everyone who walks in the front door for the first time and looks out the living room window exclaims about the view.
What they don't see that we're so exposed that the wind can come howling out of the North so loudly that you can't sleep.
My wife is a horse trainer. People, women mostly, are envious of the lifestyle: being out in Nature, working with horses in the fresh air. No one asks about her broken bones and the titanium pins holding her ankles and wrists together. Doesn't occur to them that whether it's 100F and humid as hell or -25F and the wind's been screaming nonstop for days that you still have to trudge out there and feed and water them.
It used to bug me. Now I barely notice. I just smile and say, "yeah, we like living out here."
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/i-bought-a-hotel-by-m...
Take away quote: “But the high summer honeymoon soon give way to an autumnal realization that the list of skills required to really make the business work was topped by secretarial and bookkeeping efficiency, home improvement handiness and a nose for where to source the cheapest toilet paper.“
Now wouldn't be the time to do it, though, most of the coffee business is commuters and office workers on break, which... yeah.
(I write operations software for food-service businesses, so I'm fairly familiar with the market dynamics.)
My estimate is: you could start a towed coffee trailer for 10-12K, about 8K of that on the trailer, the rest on some basic equipment and decoration.
Rent the espresso machine & grinder for 150 / month (including maintenance & repair) instead of buying for 8K. Food & drinks wholesale: croissants are 0.2, donuts 0.5, fancy Italian water 0.6 and they sell for at least 3x as much
As the article says, even the most deluxe coffee is cheap. I calculated a cost of 1.09EUR for a latte, including 10g of coffee, 300ml of fair trade milk, a bio degradable cup + lid + sleeve and takes 3 min to prepare.
The hard part is learning to operate a professional espresso machine and dealing with the local laws about food trucks.
But yeah, best not during a pandemic.
Food cost at 30-35% of sale price, as it sounds like your latte cost indicates, is pretty much in the sweet spot for food service; it's also nice in that most of the ingredients for coffee keep well enough to minimize food waste. Pastries are more of a challenge to do efficiently.
This is part of why food in less-dense areas dominated by big chains - when all your customers need to drive half an hour or more to get to you and food culture isn't driven as much by novelty-seeking, it's hard to get a following before your runway runs out. Big chains are very experienced/cost-efficient, and have the capital to last if things start slow.
If you don't need to account for narrow streets in a big city, and congested parking, then short buses are often a steal in the US. Plus lots of room. That said, there is a coffee van owner who lives near me and they can easily park the vehicle in their double driveway.