Welcome, Emperors! 👑
Some time ago for Features Buffet we went through equipment inside the food truck needed for building your empire in the SPCU order.
Now, it’s time for some more in-depth explanations of the systems and mechanics of Food Truck Empire concerning the cooking pipeline and its optimization. Knowledge of hydraulics is not mandatory. Let’s go! 🤠
In Food Truck Empire, your food is judged by the world’s worst critic - the hungry public. 🙃
Many aspects are taken into account when measuring how successful your food truck is in the eyes of the crowd, like Preparation time, Potential of ingredients or the overall Flavor of the food.
To improve your review scores, you need to start using better ingredients and more equipment.. You can’t build an empire on premade patties and bought baked goods. These are great for at the beginning, don’t get us wrong - but you will have to sooner or later implement some changes to your layout. 🚚
Every ingredient in Food Truck Empire has an inherent value of Potential. To keep it brief, it's all about what can you do with a particular ingredients and how many steps of Preparation you include. 🔪
Some ingredients can go through a lot of different steps, while others have only 1 or 2. For example, Premade Patties have low Potential. Once you upgrade to Processed Meat which is higher in Potential, you can add a Manual Preparation step that can make the Quality of the overall dish better in the long run. ⭐
For the sake of this explanation, let's use the highest Potential ingredients when it comes to Burgers so Raw Meat pieces. They have the same value as a Premade Patties, so 1, until you process the Meat to a form of Processed Meat. You can finish here with 2 slots of Potential, but you can go even further and then form proper patties from that meat. By doing this, your Potential jumped from 2 to 3. ☝️
However, you can just as well get the Raw Meat and slap it on the grill. Would it be then better than the Premade Patty? Well, not really.🙃
That's why upgrading your food truck interior with new equipment is as important as getting new ingredients. But, as in a lot of systems in Food Truck Empire, how you approach the potential of the ingredients is entirely up to you. Do you want to get Michelin Stars and prepare all your ingredients from scratch or would you rather just stick with Frozen and Premade ingredients Fast Food style? 👨🍳👩🍳
The next important value is the Flavor of the dish you are serving to customers. Cooking and seasoning brings Flavor to whatever you are serving, but it is very heavily reliant on the ingredients' Potential and Preparation steps.
The value of Flavor is based on how many Potential slots your Ingredients have. As described above, some Ingredients have more Potential than others, but that doesn't mean you have to fully make use of that potential. 😎
For example, grilling can give you up to +3 Flavor if your ingredient's potential matches that number. So if you are using only Premade Patties, your Flavor will only be 1 no matter how good your equipment or seasoning gets, because the initial Potential is too low for the +3 from the Grill to matter. If you prepare Raw Meat to the Processed Meat stage only, then it will only ever have 2 Flavor, even though Raw Meat itself can be brought to up to 3 Potential. 🤓
When it comes to serving your customers, the food’s quality matters a lot but it is not the only vital component to raving reviews. You also have to provide great service on time. Ambitious dishes matter little when people have to wait outside your truck for 15 minutes to eat. In contrast, when food is provided very fast, your review score can improve significantly even if your dishes are mediocre at best. 😅
Every consumer is different, that’s obvious. Some eat meat, some don’t - some are lactose intolerant, and some love cheese more than anything in the world. You have to figure out what each demographic group like and understand their preferences, usual routes and schedules. Selling Steaks to Kids at 10 PM near the stadium isn’t the smartest idea. 🤔
So, plan your food truck’s kitchen accordingly to make the dishes not only delicious to your chosen demographic but also deliverable in a timely manner. Maybe seasoning BOTH the bun and meat isn’t that important or people don’t care if you use presliced cheese. Those decisions are a constant challenge to overcome in Food Truck Empire. 🚚👑
The pipeline class session is over and you are ready to put that knowledge into good use. Let’s go through 3 examples of equipped food truck’s kitchen and see what can be fixed or improved in them. For the sake of clarity, we will be using burgers in every truck below.🍔
🔸 Case 1. 🔸
Alright, our first contender and... we are not off to a great start. 😬
Do you see what’s wrong here, Emperor? Besides… everything. Well, maybe the serving counter is in the correct place, I will give them that. First of all, there is not a single piece of Manual Preparation involved except cutting the bun in two. Moreover, the pieces of furniture are too far from each other making the whole process a lot slower. Let’s try to fix it a little, shall we? 💪
See, better already! 🤗
We improved the quality of the food overall by changing premade patties with Processed meat. That added one more step to the preparation, as we needed to add a Working station, but it overall boosted our score with customers. Then we also changed the layout of the whole truck, literally keeping only the Serving Counter where it was, to make the process of cooking much faster.
🔸 Case 2. 🔸
Okay, the previous one was a warm-up. Are you ready for something more challenging, Emperor? 🧐
This time, someone wanted to create a delicious Fish Burger with freshly baked Buns. We wonder what can be improved here…
Alright, alright - this one is better already - at least you don’t have to run around the truck like a headless chicken! 🐔
However, there are still some issues. To begin with, creating bread from scratch sounds awesome, but is not optimal for this type of dish. Do you really need to create your own dough for it as well? And also, the bun itself has so many steps involved while the Fish is premade and then just reheated in an Adventure Oven (hip name for a microwave). Let’s see how to improve it…
✨This looks exquisite! ✨
By exchanging some of the preparation steps from bread to fish, the quality of the food itself has improved while also maintaining a better potential for the buns. The fish is not premade and you have to do some prep work to bring its Potential further. Through optimization of both operations, this food truck now works much better and provides better service than before. Great job! 👍
🔸 Case 3. 🔸
Alright, 2 down, 1 more to go! Let’s take a look at the last screenshot of a mobile kitchen.
We’re stumped - is there anything to improve? 🤨
Maybe you could try creating your own buns, but that ain’t a deal-breaker as you already have 3 ingredients involved in the preparation and space in the food truck is really limited. Do you see anything that can be improved here? We believe it’s fantastischly optimized already... or is it?
The inside optimization of the truck ain’t so hard after all!🙌
The most important lesson from this post is that ingredients' Potential is unleashed through Preparation while forms of Cooking brings Flavor. With both the prior knowledge of equipment and now the pipeline optimization skills, you will build a successful Empire in no time. If you have any questions regarding this post or Food Truck Empire in general - let us know below in the comments.
Stay über awesome <3
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