ENTRE 370 · New Venture Development
A proposed real-time discovery platform designed to help diners find nearby food trucks—and help mobile operators turn accurate location and schedule visibility into more sales.
The opportunity
Food truck operators move frequently, but the tools customers use to find them usually do not. Social posts reach existing followers, websites require diners to search deliberately, and static map listings can send customers to the wrong place.
FoodTrack brings location, schedules, menus, reviews, dietary filters, and updates into one mobile experience. The course team developed the concept through primary research with Seattle-area operators and diners, then translated that research into a product, pricing, launch, and risk plan.
Operator problem
Interviews with Sugar + Spoon and The Original Hot Dog Stand surfaced the same pattern: customers cannot reliably tell where a truck is operating, while owners spend time repeating schedule and location updates across channels that many diners never see.
Product concept
From research to execution
The class work treated FoodTrack as a two-sided marketplace: operators need diners on the platform, and diners need enough participating trucks to make the app useful.
Recruit an initial Seattle-area group, make onboarding hands-on, and use operator feedback to refine the product before scaling demand.
Test a $50–$75 monthly operator subscription, with local advertising and service partnerships as potential supplemental revenue—not assumptions of current income.
The plan evaluates mapping, authentication, payments, notifications, and review integrations while identifying live-location reliability as the central technical risk.
Sydney’s perspective
Sydney brought an operator’s view to the team. As a Sugar + Spoon manager, she has seen how mobile service locations, event schedules, customer communication, and day-to-day execution intersect. That experience helped ground the opportunity in a real workflow—not only a classroom hypothesis.
Her industry relationships also create a practical path for continued interviews, early feedback, and operator recruitment as the concept moves toward a prototype. The next phase is to narrow the first release, validate the location-update workflow, and pair the business concept with the technical talent needed to build it reliably.
FoodTrack was developed as an ENTRE 370 New Venture Development Project with three classmates. Research figures shown here describe the team’s course sample; the product has not been presented as launched, funded, or revenue-generating.
← Back to selected projects