The Business of Food Trucks [INFOGRAPHIC]

With the recent boom of the gourmet Food Truck industry, there has been an interesting amount of speculation about the supposed “bubble” the mobile food truck segment is facing. While idea of mobile food vehicles are far from new, it’s the recent national attention that food trucks have been getting that brings up a great many questions about the movement’s longevity.

Are food truck menu prices too high? Are we being over saturated as an audience, and is the market too dense for incoming food truck entrepreneurs? All these questions remain to be answered, but recent studies from data and polling collected during the last calendar year of 2011 begs to differ.

TECHNOMIC, a food industry consulting group, recently put out a Food Trucks Innovation Report with some interesting figures for the segment. For those who thought the Food Truck movement was nearing its decline, it’s not. At least not what these numbers are saying, and for the immediate future, most of the news is good for fans of the trucks, fans of the movement, and the entrepreneurs involved.

91% of consumers polled who are familiar with food trucks view the trend as having staying power. Also revealed are some borderline daunting figures for owners of brick-and-mortar quick-service establishments, including a note that 54 percent of the respondents saying that if they had not bought from a food truck, a quick service restaurant would have been their “most likely destination.”

It’s not all peaches for the food trucks though. While not indicative of a plateau, TECHNOMIC’s research points to 70 percent of non-Truck-users are still hesitant to make a purchase from the mobile food vehicles. While marked as a growth challenge, a devil’s advocate would consider that an untapped consumer.

What are your thoughts on the food truck movement? Just beginning? Right in the middle? Or starting to fall off?

[Based off information from Technomic’s Food Truck Industry Report]