Why "food trucks near me" never shows your truck

First, yes, you are allowed one

A lot of owners assume Google Business Profiles are for places with a front door, and that a truck does not qualify. Not true. Google has a category for exactly your situation: a business that goes to its customers instead of the other way round.

Google calls it a service-area business, and describes it as "a business that visits or delivers to customers directly but doesn't serve customers at their business address". A truck that parks at a different spot three days a week is that, exactly.

The mistake almost everybody makes

Here is the part that trips people up, and it is worth reading Google's wording rather than mine.

Google says: "If you don't serve customers at your business address, remove your address from your Business Profile."

Remove. Not hide. Those are different buttons and only one of them is what Google asks for. If your profile still carries the address of your commissary, your house, or the kitchen you prep out of, you are telling Google you serve customers at a place where you do not, and where nobody can come and eat.

In its place you set your service area. Google allows up to 20 cities or postal codes, which on Maui is more than enough to cover everywhere you realistically park.

What to actually fill in

None of this is clever. It is just tedious, and tedious is why most trucks never finish it.

The thing a profile still cannot do

A Business Profile is very good at one job: existing in the map when somebody searches. It is bad at the job you actually have, which is telling people where you are parked today and whether you are open right now.

You cannot update a profile from the window at 10:50 while you are prepping. You can update a page. That is the whole reason this site exists, and it is why every truck site we build opens with today's spot and an open or closed state you flip from your phone.

Go look at the sites we have actually built if you want to see what that looks like in practice.

While you are doing paperwork anyway

Two Maui-specific things worth a check on the same afternoon, because both are the kind of thing that lapses quietly.

• Your Food Establishment Permit through the Hawaii Department of Health. Applications and the current fee schedule are on the DOH Food Safety Branch page, and the office covering Maui, Molokai and Lanai is in Wailuku. Fees are risk-based, so read the current schedule rather than trusting a number you saw on a blog, including this one.
• Your county vending licence, if you sell anywhere in a county right of way. That runs through Maui County, and it is separate from the DOH permit. Having one is not having the other.

We are a web design shop, not your permit adviser. Confirm anything that matters with the agency itself.

If you only do one thing

Open your profile on your phone tonight and look at what address it shows. If it shows any address at all, that is your afternoon's work, and it is free.

Then look at where the website link goes. If it goes nowhere, or to a Facebook page you stopped updating in 2024, that is the next one.