For street food trucks · Festivals · Pop-ups · Lunch rushes
Food truck waitlist — keep the line moving without losing customers.
Lunch rush at the food truck. Festival queue 40 deep. Pop-up that ran out of brisket last week. The List is a free food truck waitlist that turns the line into a virtual queue — customers wander, you cook, no one defects to the truck across the lot.
Long line = lost customers. Virtual queue = both win.
Customer scans the QR on the side of the truck, joins the queue, and goes to find shade or a beer while you cook the order in front of them.
Decal the QR onto the truck
Print one big QR poster, vinyl-laminate it, stick it to the side of the truck. Permanent, weatherproof, free to generate via our QR tool.
Customer-side: scan and wander
Customer scans the QR with their phone camera, types their name, gets a queue position. Goes to the picnic tables, the bar, the next stall. Comes back when up.
Cook-side: the queue runs from your phone
Whoever's running the truck opens the admin URL on their phone, sees the live queue, taps Done as orders are picked up. No tablet on the food prep surface.
Optional SMS when ready
Customer enters phone number, you tap a button when their food's up. Pay-per-text via Twilio (~$0.10) — much cheaper than the staff member shouting names.
Festival-friendly
Same QR works wherever the truck parks. Customers at Glastonbury or a brewery yard or a farmer's market all use the same scan-and-queue flow.
Free forever
No subscription, no per-event fee, no festival surcharge. Run it for the lunch rush, run it for an 8-hour festival, run it once a month — same £0.
The food truck queue problem is uniquely visible: a 30-person line snaking past your truck on a Saturday lunchtime is theatre that draws more customers AND loses customers at the same time. Theatre because a long queue signals quality. Loss because customers at the back can see another truck across the lot with no queue, and they walk. Festival data on this is brutal — the modal 4th-in-line customer at any popular truck eventually gives up and buys cheaper-but-less-good food from a less popular vendor 30 metres away.
The List solves the visibility-vs-loss problem by moving the queue off the line. The QR sticker on the side of the truck lets new arrivals join the queue without standing in it. They scan, type a name, get a position. They go find shade, get a beer, sit on a hay bale, pet a dog — anything except stand in the heat for 20 minutes losing patience. The truck still has the visual queue (regular walk-up customers will still queue physically) AND the virtual queue (customers who scanned). Whoever's at the top of either queue gets called next.
Festivals are the breakout use case. Most food trucks at major festivals see 6+ hour service stretches with 20-30 minute queues at peak. A scan-and-wander queue means each customer's wait time is comfortable enough that they buy a drink at the bar tent during it (which the festival's actually quite happy about, since they get a drink margin out of someone they wouldn't have otherwise served). Win for the customer, the truck, and the festival.
Free forever for food trucks. No subscription, no per-event surcharge, no festival surcharge, no "event-day mode" upsell. The optional pay-per-SMS feature (~$0.10/text via Twilio) lets you text customers when their food's ready instead of shouting names, which is a quality-of-service upgrade that competitors charge $89-299/month flat for. We charge per-text only, which usually works out to under $10/day for a busy festival service.
Saturday lunchtime brewery yard, smashburger truck, 4-hour service
Typical run-of-show
- 1Vinyl-laminated QR poster fixed to the truck's serving window.
- 212:00 — first customer scans, joins queue. Position #1. Order: smash double, no pickle.
- 312:15 — peak. 18 in the virtual queue, 6 standing in physical line.
- 4Cook taps Done as each order goes out. Top of queue is next called.
- 5Customer at #14 wandered to the brewery's beer garden. Phone says "3 ahead." Stays for another beer.
- 616:00 — service closes. Final count: 87 served. Total software cost: £0 (or ~$8 if SMS bolt-on used).
How food trucks differ from restaurant waitlists
The flow is faster. A restaurant table holds a party for 60-90 minutes; a food truck order is in-and-out in 5-10 minutes. So the queue moves quickly — the dashboard mostly shows position changes rather than party-size matching. You don't need the "match a 4-top table to a party of 4" feature; you need fast Done taps and accurate position updates.
There's no concept of "table size." Every order is essentially a single-party transaction. So the dashboard simplifies — it's a list of names in queue order with a Done button per row. Less UI than the restaurant flow, fewer decisions per customer.
Mobility is the whole point. Customers wander between scans, vendors, and seating areas in ways restaurant customers don't. The phone-based queue position is THE feature for food trucks specifically, more than for restaurants.
Festival use — what changes
Wifi is unreliable at most festivals, but customers' 4G/5G usually works. The List loads fine over mobile data. We've tested it at outdoor events with patchy coverage and the page recovers gracefully when signal returns — queue state is on the server, not the device.
Battery drain on the cook's phone is the main practical issue. A typical iPhone running The List dashboard plus the food truck's payment app for 6 hours straight will hit 30% by service end. Recommendation: portable battery pack on the truck, or use a slightly older spare phone exclusively for the dashboard.
Some festivals require vendors to use the festival's own ordering app — check before relying on The List. Where vendors have free choice (most independent events, brewery yards, market days, school fetes), The List works fine.
Questions hosts ask
What if the truck doesn't take phone numbers — is the SMS feature pointless?+
Phone capture is optional. The List works fine with name-only signup — customers get their queue position from the page they're already on, no SMS needed. The SMS feature is a nice-to-have for festivals where customers wander far enough that they can't see the truck, not a requirement.
How big should the QR poster be on the truck?+
Big enough to scan from 3 metres away. The free QR poster generator at /shop-poster outputs a print-ready PDF — order a vinyl-laminated version (~£15 from any local printer) and stick it on the truck. Should last a season at minimum.
What about pre-orders / order-ahead?+
Out of scope. The List is a queue tool, not an ordering system. If you want customers to pre-order food for a specific time slot, look at Square's online ordering or a tool like Toast. The List handles the in-person walk-up queue.
What if I do multiple events per week — do I have to start a new queue each time?+
Yes — events auto-expire 48 hours after the last activity, which means your Saturday queue is gone by Monday. Start a fresh queue each event. The QR can stay the same if you use a Series setup (same stable URL across events) — see /s for the recurring-event flow.
Does this replace shouting customer names when food's ready?+
Yes — when a customer's food is ready, the cook can tap a button and the customer's phone shows "YOUR ORDER IS READY" prominently. Or if they entered a phone number, optional SMS. Either is more reliable than shouting in a noisy festival yard.
Is there a price-per-customer? What if I serve 200 in a day?+
Free for any volume. We've tested with synthetic loads of 500+ simultaneous queue holders — a single busy food truck won't approach that ceiling. The optional pay-per-SMS bolt-on charges per text sent (~$0.10), so a 200-customer day with full SMS usage would be ~$20. Without SMS, it's £0.
Ready in 10 seconds.
Tap the button. Share the QR. That's it.
Running something else?