How to Start a Food Truck in Canada: Costs and Year One

Starting a food truck in Canada takes about $106,000 with a used, equipped truck in a big city, five to six months of lead time, and one decision most guides get backwards: the truck is the last thing you buy. The calendar comes first, then the kitchen, then the approvals. The vehicle only makes sense once those three are settled.

The order matters because every expensive mistake in this business is a sequencing mistake. Someone buys a $70,000 truck in February. In April they learn the city they wanted has a vending permit they can't afford, the commissary kitchens nearby are full, and the propane system was never approved for their province.

So this is the start-up sequence, with a real budget and an honest first-year model. The city-by-city fees live in our food truck permits guide. This piece covers everything around the permits: the money, the order, and what year one pays.

What order should you do things in?

Work backwards from your first service day. For a May launch, that means starting in November or December.

When	Step	Why it sits here
6 months out	Pick your home city and read its vending bylaw	The bylaw decides where you can park, and whether street vending pays at all
5 months out	Line up events, markets and private bookings	Confirmed dates are what a lender wants to see
5 months out	Sign a commissary kitchen	Health approval is tied to the kitchen you name
4 months out	Register the business and open a GST/HST account	You want the tax account open before the big purchases
4 months out	Arrange financing	Approval takes weeks, and sellers don't wait
3 months out	Buy the truck, with its approvals verified	Now you know what the truck has to do, and where
2 months out	Gas, fire, health and vehicle inspections	Any one of them can send you back to the shop
1 month out	Municipal licence and vending permit	Toronto, for one, wants the inspection paperwork in hand first
2 weeks out	Soft launch at a small private event	Find out what breaks before a festival lineup does

Two steps in that table surprise people.

The first is booking before buying. A food truck is an events business that happens to have a kitchen. Street lunch service is the part everyone sees, but the dependable money is festivals, markets, brewery patios, weddings and office lunches, and many summer line-ups are picked in the spring. If you can't fill a calendar on paper, a truck won't fix that.

The second is registering for GST/HST early. The CRA's small supplier rule lets you stay unregistered until you pass $30,000 in taxable sales, measured over a single calendar quarter or four in a row. A truck working festivals crosses that line in its first summer. Register voluntarily before you buy, and the HST on a dealer-sold truck comes back as an input tax credit. On a $65,000 truck in Ontario, that's $8,450.

How much does it cost to start a food truck in Canada?

"Between $50,000 and $200,000" is the answer you'll find everywhere, and it helps nobody. Here's one specific scenario instead: a used, equipped truck, based in Toronto, with a six-month street vending permit for the first season.

Line	Cost (CAD)
Used truck, equipped	$65,000
Repairs, wrap, bringing it up to code	$8,000
City of Toronto licence and 6-month vending permit	$5,361
Insurance: $2M liability, commercial auto, equipment	$3,000
Commissary kitchen, deposit plus first two months	$3,000
Opening inventory and packaging	$4,000
POS, smallwares, signage	$3,000
Working capital	$15,000
Total	$106,361

The truck is 61% of that budget. It's also the only line people research.

The permit figure comes straight from the City of Toronto's 2026 fee schedule: $286.47 to apply, $1,177.67 for the licence, and $3,896.58 for a six-month mobile vending permit. Go for the twelve-month permit at $7,793.15 and the same line becomes $9,257. Most Canadian cities charge far less than Toronto, so treat this as the top of the range. For the insurance line, our guide to restaurant insurance in Canada explains what each policy covers.

The two lines that get skipped are the bring-to-code money and the working capital. A used truck almost never passes every inspection as delivered. And $15,000 in the bank is what carries you through a rained-out long weekend in June.

For scale: our line-by-line budget for opening a 35-seat restaurant in Canada lands between $333,200 and $536,000. A truck costs a fifth to a third of that. It is not cheap. It is cheaper.

Which licences do you need, and which one sets your launch date?

Four approvals, from four different desks:

1. Business registration. A CRA business number and, as above, a GST/HST account.
2. Health approval. Your provincial or local health authority inspects the truck and the commissary kitchen behind it. The basics are the ones a restaurant faces, so our guide to preparing for a health inspection is worth reading first.
3. A municipal licence and vending permit. This is the layer that changes most from city to city. Toronto wants $2,000,000 in liability insurance and a vehicle safety certificate no more than 36 days old. Calgary wants fire, health, plumbing and gas inspections, and every food truck licence there expires on March 31.
4. Fuel safety approval. The one almost nobody budgets for.

The approval that catches used-truck buyers

In Ontario, the Technical Standards and Safety Authority regulates any truck, cart or trailer with fuel-fired cooking equipment. TSSA's rule is that every unit built after February 13, 2006 needs a TSSA field approval or certification from an accredited body, plus a yearly inspection by a licensed gas technician.

A truck that ran happily in another province can still be missing that approval. In October 2025, a Quebec builder was fined $30,000 for selling an Ontario caterer an unapproved 2010 food truck with a falsified approval label on it.

Before you hand over a deposit on a used truck in Ontario, call TSSA at 1-877-682-8772 and ask them to confirm the field approval. It takes one phone call. Other provinces run their own gas safety regimes, so ask your local authority the same question before you buy anywhere.

That's why the fuel approval, not the vending permit, tends to decide your launch date. Toronto asks for the gas inspection before it licenses the truck, and a failed one means parts, a technician and a rebooked appointment in the busiest month of the year.

Should you buy used, buy new, or lease?

Option	What it costs	Good for	Watch for
Used, equipped	From about $40,000	A first season on a real budget	Missing approvals, tired equipment, mechanical surprises
New build	From about $75,000, averaging $90,000	A concept that has already proven itself	Months of build time before you serve anything
Lease	$2,000 to $5,000 a month	Testing one season before committing	Six months costs $12,000 to $30,000 and leaves you owning nothing

Those figures come from Square Canada's food truck cost breakdown.

Our take: don't buy new in year one. You don't know your menu yet. You think you do, and then a July festival teaches you that the dish you built the kitchen around takes four minutes too long. Buy used or lease, learn what the line needs, and spec the dream truck in year three with real numbers behind it.

How do you pay for it?

Most first trucks are financed with a mix of savings and one of two programs.

The Canada Small Business Financing Program. You apply through a bank, credit union or caisse populaire, and the federal government shares the risk with the lender. The program covers new or used equipment and commercial vehicles, up to $500,000 for equipment and leasehold improvements. Rates are capped at prime plus 3% on a floating term loan, and there's a 2% registration fee you can roll into the loan.

Futurpreneur. Futurpreneur offers up to $75,000 for young entrepreneurs in business for 24 months or less, paired with a mentor. Their programs are aimed at founders aged 18 to 39.

To make it concrete: borrow $70,000 over seven years at 8% and the payment is about $1,091 a month. Every month. Including February.

Lenders finance assets and evidence, which is the other reason to book events before you shop for a truck. A page of confirmed dates does more for a loan application than a logo.

What does the first year actually pay?

Here's a first-season model for that same Toronto truck. It runs 26 weeks, May through October, four service days a week. All sales are before HST.

	Days	Average per day	Season total
Street lunch service	60	$900	$54,000
Festivals and markets	30	$2,500	$75,000
Private catering	14	$2,000	$28,000
Sales	104		$157,000

Annual cost	Amount
Food and packaging, 32% of sales	$50,240
One hired cook, $20 an hour plus payroll costs	$23,500
Commissary kitchen, 12 months at $1,500	$18,000
Loan payments, 12 months	$13,093
Fuel, propane, generator	$7,000
Event and vendor fees	$6,000
Repairs and maintenance	$6,000
Licence and vending permit	$5,361
Card processing, about 2.7%	$4,239
Insurance	$3,000
POS, phone, bookkeeping	$3,000
Total costs	$139,433
Left for the owner, before income tax	$17,567

That's $17,567 for six months of sixty-hour weeks. These are our assumptions, not an industry average, and your numbers will differ. But the shape holds, and three things in it are worth staring at.

Street service is the weakest line. Sixty days of parking and hoping produce less than thirty days of events. Vendor fees at small-town events are modest: Renfrew's Craft Beer and Food Truck Festival charges $150 for a spot in 2026. Larger festivals charge more, and some take a cut of sales, so ask before you apply.

Winter eats what summer leaves. From November to April the truck earns nothing in this model, but the commissary ($9,000), the loan ($6,546) and half the insurance ($1,500) keep billing. That's about $17,000, almost exactly what the season left over. It's the same trap we describe in why a restaurant can look profitable and still be broke, compressed into one vehicle.

Catering is where the lever is. Ten more private bookings at $2,000 add $20,000 in sales and, after food, labour and card fees, about $10,800 to what you keep. No vendor fee, a known headcount, and almost no waste. One winter office-lunch contract changes the year more than any menu tweak.

Two smaller dials: food cost and card fees. At 32%, every point of food cost is worth $1,570, so learn how to calculate food cost percentage before you price the menu. And with $12 tickets, the per-transaction fee matters more than the headline rate. We break that down in what restaurants actually pay in processing fees.

Do most food trucks fail?

You'll read that 60% of food trucks close within three years. Nobody can point to the study. Even Toast, which sells software to food trucks, says it can't find reliable data behind the 50% to 60% claims.

So ignore the number. The trucks that close don't close because of a statistic. They close in March, when twelve months of fixed costs meet six months of income and there was no plan for the gap. If your model has an answer for November to April, you're ahead of most of the field before you've sold a taco.

Where does a food truck lead?

Some operators run a truck for twenty years and love it. Many use it as the cheapest honest test of a restaurant idea: real customers, real food costs, real 14-hour days, without a five-year lease.

If that's your plan, say so from day one and collect the proof as you go: sales by item, repeat customers, catering clients who would follow you indoors. Then, when you're ready, the path into a fixed space is laid out in our guide on how to open a restaurant in Canada. If a dining room still feels like too much, a ghost kitchen is the step in between.

Either way, start with the calendar. Buy the truck last.

Sources: City of Toronto, City of Calgary, Technical Standards and Safety Authority, Canada Revenue Agency, Canada Small Business Financing Program, Futurpreneur, Square Canada, Toast.

---

When you're ready to take reservations, Trudy's Table is built for Canadian independents.

---