Anatomy of a fundable $85K food truck plan — a worked example
Everything below is invented — the truck, the owner, the numbers — but the arithmetic is the kind a lender actually runs. Building one fictional file from scratch, end to end, shows what "fundable" looks like in numbers rather than adjectives.
The business: Northline Kitchen
Northline Kitchen is invented for this example — a lunch-and-dinner food truck in a mid-sized Canadian city, run by a single owner-operator with one part-time cook during peak months. Nothing about the name, the owner, or the numbers below is real; the point is to show the kind of arithmetic that makes a small, seasonal food-service loan read as fundable rather than hopeful.
Where the $100,000 goes
The project totals $100,000: $58,000 for a used truck and its kitchen retrofit — hood, grease trap, flooring, generator mount; $16,000 for kitchen equipment — flat-top griddle, fryer, reach-in fridge and freezer, prep tables; $6,000 for the wrap, signage, POS system, and smallwares; $2,000 for permits, business licensing, and initial insurance; and $18,000 held back as a working capital reserve rather than spent on anything visible. The owner contributes $15,000 in cash toward the truck deposit and smallwares — real money in before the loan, not just a number on a page. The loan request is the remaining $85,000.
Season-aware revenue: service days × covers × average ticket
The revenue line is built from three numbers multiplied together, not asserted as a single figure: service days in the month, average covers per service day, and average ticket. Northline Kitchen's plan splits the year into three bands. Peak season, May through October: 24 service days a month, 90 covers a day, a $15 average ticket — $32,400 a month, six months, $194,400. Shoulder season, April and November: 16 days, 55 covers, the same $15 ticket — $13,200 a month, two months, $26,400. Winter, December through March: 10 days, 35 covers, $15 — $5,250 a month, four months, $21,000. Total projected annual revenue: $241,800.
Operating costs, month to month
Against that revenue: food cost at roughly 32% of revenue, about $77,000 for the year; labour, including a real wage for the owner and a part-time cook through peak season, $70,000; and $45,000 in remaining costs — propane, commissary kitchen rent, insurance, POS fees, truck maintenance, and permit renewals. Total operating costs before any loan payment: $192,000.
Working capital and the winter problem
A food truck's revenue swings hard by season, and the $18,000 working capital reserve exists specifically to cover the four winter months, when revenue drops to roughly a sixth of a peak month while fixed costs — insurance, commissary rent, the loan payment — keep running regardless. Without that reserve stated explicitly, a lender is left to wonder how the business survives December through March. With it, the winter isn't a gap in the plan; it's a line item that's already been solved.
The DSCR arithmetic
On $85,000 over five years at roughly 9%, the loan payment works out to about $1,700 a month, or $20,400 a year. Annual revenue of $241,800 less $192,000 in operating costs leaves $49,800 available to service that debt. Divide the two: $49,800 over $20,400 is a debt-service coverage ratio of about 2.4×, comfortably above the roughly 1.25× line most lenders treat as their comfort threshold. That's the single number the rest of the file exists to support.
A DSCR of 2.4× on paper means nothing if the revenue line above it is a guess. The arithmetic only convinces me once I can see where every input came from.
Why the file works as a whole
No single number makes Northline Kitchen's file fundable. It's that the equipment costs are itemized rather than round, the revenue is built from a formula rather than a hope, the owner has real cash in before the bank's, the working capital line specifically answers the winter question, and the DSCR shown is the output of everything above it rather than a number picked because it sounded safe. That's what a fundable file looks like from the inside — not confidence, arithmetic that holds together when someone pulls on any one thread of it.
Build the arithmetic behind your own ask
LenderReady builds your revenue drivers, operating costs, working capital, and DSCR through a conversation — the same inputs shown above, sized to your own business instead of an example.
Build my planLenderReady is an educational service, not a lender, broker, or financial advisor. Lending criteria vary by institution and change over time; treat this as a starting point, not a guarantee.