Coffee trucks: a brilliant idea that someone should do?

post by KatjaGrace · 2021-02-20T07:50:12.401Z · LW · GW · 4 comments

I sometimes wonder if the world should have coffee trucks, like ice cream trucks, roaming the street. Especially when half the population is working from home.

Coffee seems ideal for this because:

1. you can probably prepare it fresh in a briefly stopping vehicle,
2. you don’t need much variety,
3. people are often flexible about when they get it,
4. they often like to get it as a short break from work in which they bump into other people,
5. more than half of the US population consumes it at least once every day, so potential demand is radically higher than for most foodstuffs!
6. most people don’t have the means to make cafe-quality coffee in their home,
7. it doesn’t go bad easily

There are clearly stationary coffee trucks, like food trucks. I think moving trucks may also exist or have existed ever, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one, and it’s hard to find mention of them. Here are some people who had the same idea, but since nobody was expecting a moving coffee bus, they got more traffic sitting still like a cafe. But surely people expecting your product to exist is an obstacle not unique to circulating coffee trucks. Here is someone with the same idea, and someone who says there was one in a holiday park once, and some others who think they exist in Australia and Buffalo, but it sounds like they might be thinking of stationary coffee trucks.

I’m not sure that it’s good for any kind of truck to exist if it makes noise all the time as it travels through neighborhoods, delighting some, but surely disrupting others. But I think that can be entirely resolved digitally: instead of the truck playing music, the service could have an app that plays music when truck is approaching, if you signed up for that. Then you touch the notification to turn off the music and at the same time report whether you want a coffee.

Am I missing something?

4 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.