Alcomtec

Mobile, trendy, and offering a low cost of entry, food trucks are giving entrepreneurs around the world the opportunity to earn their fortunes in the famously competitive fast-dining sector. For many “restraupreneurs,” food trucks are their very first foray into the dining business. The format has also been particularly advantageous for minority entrepreneurs; one survey of the Chicago food truck scene found that roughly 80% were minority-owned small businesses. But because most of them are small and family-owned businesses, food trucks don’t have access to most of the resources that large restaurants and chains use to manage and market their products. That can leave them at a disadvantage.

Results

Enter Fudtrak and Fudtraker, which are solving some of food truck owners’ biggest business challenges. “People love food trucks, but they don’t always know where to find them,” says Jaime Luna, president of Alcomtec. To fix this problem, the company developed Fudtraker, a mobile app that helps enthusiasts find their favorite food trucks. Features include directions to food trucks through a Google Maps integration, social media integrations, the ability to view menus and call food trucks from within the app, and the ability to place online orders. “Fudtraker lets people search for specific food trucks, or discover which food trucks are near them,” Luna says. “In this way, we’re solving one of the biggest marketing challenges food truck owners face: helping customers find them.”

Complementing Fudtraker is an equally powerful app, Fudtrak, which offers inventory management at the recipe level as well as a point of sale (POS) solution that’s optimized for web and mobile use. It also offers a configurable dashboard that gives owners at-a-glance insights into their operations.

Luna built both apps using the Rocket UniData® application platform, integrating RESTful services as well as Angular and Flutter to flesh out the mobile and web interfaces. The app is hosted using a public cloud service, making it easy for the app to scale cost-effectively as demand increases. “Being a MultiValue database platform, Rocket UniData offers a uniquely flexible framework that accelerates web application development timetables,” Luna says. “Combining that with the ability to host apps using a public cloud has made it an extremely efficient platform to power Fudtrak and Fudtraker. UniData and Rocket Software have unequivocally been an asset in our mission to empower small business entrepreneurship.”