Roaming Hunger Survey: We polled our food truck partners to see what they seek in an insurance provider for their roving culinary business. Read below to find the best practices and providers for your food truck, trailer, cart, or pop-up!
Food truck insurance is crucial to every owner, and a topic that is also crucial to working with Roaming Hunger. When a food truck gets booked for a catering event, for example, we require that they have a current Certificate of Insurance on file and that they add us as an additional insured.
While this process is super easy when you have a great insurance company, we’ve noticed that insurance brokers sometimes make it harder than it should be on you. Worse, some brokers have tried to charge food trucks for adding an additional insured to the certificate.
Here’s our guide to getting the right food truck insurance (with advice from our partners who have actually done it). We’ve broken it down into simplified steps so you can check insurance off your list once and for all. Let’s guide you down the right path — safe, insured roads are ahead!
Step 1: Identify Your Insurance Needs
What aspects of your business keep you up at night? Do you have a cotton candy machine that’s gotten a little too close to catching on fire once or twice? Does one of your drivers freak you out on the freeway? Ever rented out your cart to a particularly rowdy wedding party?
Believe it or not, the things that scare you about your business can help you identify what you need in insurance coverage. By the time you get on the phone with an insurance agent, you’ll have a needs-based idea of what to tell them.
Nelly Belly Pizza Truck uses Cincinnati Insurance because of a horror story. Owner Melissa Nelson says:
“We had a brand new truck with 5,000 miles on it, but it needed a new engine. Turns out, we had to cancel five weeks of important business because wee thought we were covered, but we weren’t… so we switched. Make sure your company insures breakdown mechanical and not just truck breakdown from an accident!”
Takeaway: Ask every question, check every detail of your plan.
Step 2: Community, Community, Community!
Another great tidbit we heard from our vendors is to reach out within your community to other local food trucks. We first heard this from Rocket Diner 321, who uses State Farm – they said, “Our local branch was recommended to us by another food truck.”
So, why not save yourself some of the work and speak to those who have already done it?
In the same vein, our food truck owners recommend you always read the reviews.
With insurance, it’s easy to just pick the provider best marketed to us — because insurance can be intimidating. We know that some of you spend more time reading reviews to pick out a restaurant for Friday night dinner than you do on insurance. Priorities, people!
When Nikita Seal of ZZ’s Ice Cream Puffs, who uses Next Insurance, checked out the company’s reviews, she found that folks rated it “easy to set up and affordable,” and she says, she saw promises “that the company wouldn’t constantly hassle me to upgrade in any way.”
Mars Chapman, of Casey’s New Orleans Snowballs recommends using an agency as an intermediary to find the right company. In other news, even ice cream puffs can be insured, just in case you didn’t already know.
Takeaway: Recommendations are key!
Step 3: Ditch Poor Insurance Practices
While most insurance companies are reputable, there are some questionable insurance brokers out there that profit from a food truck owner’s lack of expertise. Look out for red flags like charging for adding us or a venue to a COI. If they do, it’s best to keep looking at other options.
The owners of Rocket Diner 321 advise:
“The insurance company needs to know about the requirements for a food truck. This keeps you from paying too much and wasting your hard earned money.
– You want a direct line to the representative or team who handles your account.
– If you add a last minute food truck event, you need the event added as an Additional Insured.
– A great insurance company will get your COI (Certificate of Insurance) sent to the event quickly and you can focus on serving your food to hungry guests.
Have a conversation with your representative about how to handle a claim should anything go wrong.”
Takeaway: Make sure your COI is always accessible.
A Few More Things to Look Out for:
1. ELPI Coverage (Employment Practices Liability Insurance): Don’t skip this one if you have any employees. It covers you financially if at any point you have to pay out claims made by employees in terms of wrongful termination, harassment, and others. It’s not that expensive, so if you have ANY employees, you need this one.
2. Shop Around: Insurers can capitalize on your fear and anxiety around insurance and assume that you’ll automatically sign with them. Make sure the representative you’re speaking to knows that you are shopping around. They might give you better deals and will be less likely to take advantage of your newness. They want your business, so act like it! It’s okay to play a little hard to get.
3. Lead Time is Everything: If you have a big event coming up or are just starting on your Roaming Hunger journey, make sure you get a quote at least 4 weeks before you plan on serving. People who plan ahead come off as lower risk to insurance companies. Lower risk = lower price. And we LOVE lower prices.
4. Ask Questions: No question is too small when it comes to making sure your business is covered. Don’t assume that just because an insurance company is highly rated on Google, that it will work perfectly for your business. Bring up all the scenarios you worry about and make sure they’re covered under your policy before you fork over that credit card.
All in all, finding the best tailored solution for your business is the goal. Reliable agents, instant coverage and access to your certificate, unlimited additional insureds, and 24/7 access to your documents and policy are must-haves. As Rockin Burgers N Dogs says, “You don’t want to miss out on a surprise event on Saturday just because your insurance agent isn’t in the office until Monday.” Remember, with insurance, you get what you pay for — be thorough and let’s do it right the first time.
Article written by Greta Gooding
