Food Truck Scramble

Food Truck Scramble is a dynamic, hands-on business simulation designed to engage high school students in the fundamentals of entrepreneurship, economics, and decision-making. Students are challenged to grow a food truck business starting with a $500,000 budget and strategically expand across multiple city regions such as Downtown, Uptown, Riverview, and College Park.

Over the course of three simulated months, students will:

• Place and Manage Trucks: Analyze customer demand using heatmaps and evaluate market saturation to choose the best truck locations.
• Compete on Pricing: Adjust prices in response to competitor actions, discovering how competition shapes market share and profit.
• Balance Purchasing Decisions: Explore the concepts of understock and overstock losses, learning how uncertainty in demand affects inventory planning.
• Optimize Operations: Assign workers and manage costs like fuel, leasing, and supplies to maximize efficiency.
• Forecast vs. Actual Results: Compare expected profits with actual outcomes and reflect on how assumptions about competitors and demand differ from reality.
• Analyze Final Performance: Review detailed financial summaries showing month-by-month results and truck-by-truck performance to evaluate overall business success.

By the end of the lab, students will have experienced how entrepreneurial thinking, strategic planning, and adaptability drive business growth. They will not only practice critical business concepts such as demand, revenue, profit, and competition but also reflect on their own decision-making with a final writing activity framed as a report to investors.

This lab is ideal for Business, Entrepreneurship, Economics, and CTE classrooms, providing a highly interactive way to teach real-world financial literacy and business strategy.