Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - Gas prices, although decreasing, still continue to be a burden to the population who rely on their vehicles, especially for work. Some local food truck vendors say that the high prices at the pump are having a negative impact on business.
The average price for a gallon of diesel in New York today, according to AAA, is $5.75 a gallon.
"We have to decide what jobs we want to take based on the distance they are from our shop, if an event is way out in Hamburg or East Aurora we'll decline the event because it's just too far away from us." said Mike Mendola, owner of the Carnivorous food truck, based in Buffalo.
"Trucks get very low miles per gallon. So if the job is very far away, we'll just decline that out of hand before we even consider how how profitable it might be and food costs has driven our our menu prices up, which is unfortunate," Mendola adds.
The last time Mendola had to pay to fill up his diesel food truck, it was $6 a gallon.
Cheesy Chick food truck owner and operator Jonathan Rowan says that he doesn't have diesel trucks, but the non-ethanol gas that he uses for his trucks and generators costs him about $4.80 a gallon, which is still 30-40 cents more expensive than the average for a regular gallon of gasoline.
"By default, it's already a little more expensive than regular gas, which we've always been used to, but now with it going up the past few months, well over $1. More than it's been in the past six months, it's just been really tough on us, along with, like you said, the food costs. So generally, when you have two of those things hitting at the same time, it definitely eats away a lot of the bottom line," said Rowan.
How do the food trucks adapt to high gas prices and food costs? They raise their prices.
"Quite honestly, we really haven't been able to adapt to it. Mainly because this is our busy season. We can't really cut hours with staff, like a normal restaurant or another company might do. So we have taken it by kind of just the brunt force of the of rising costs. The thing we have done, this year, is we finally did raise our prices, we haven't raised them in about two, three years. So especially during COVID, we want to keep our prices stable and steady, because we know everyone was feeling the pinch of either losing their job or having hours cut. Finally, with the fuel costs, and the inflation of food products, we have raised our prices on the mobile units an extra dollar," Rowan says.
"Other things we're doing too is we're doing like rental fees. Instead of just showing up and hoping for the best or minimum guarantees. Anything that's more than about 20 minutes away from our home base in Williamsville. We've had to require like a minimum sales or some sort of like rental agreement to try to offset some of the costs. We're a family company and we've been around for 10 years now. We really like to try to go to all the events, we can see as many people as we can and kind of go further than most trucks would. However, with gas being the way it is, we really can't gamble that anymore. Where like, two, three years ago, filling up the food trucks was about 65, $70. Now, to fill up the food trucks we're looking at about $160."
See the players below for the full interviews of Mike Mendola and Jonathan Rowan:
