A street food stall

Food that does not sell is money you have already spent. Everything here is about the gap between what you make and what people actually buy that day.

Nothing here costs money. Everything here is done on a phone.

1. Work out what one plate costs you

Take one dish. List everything that goes into a single plate and what you paid for that quantity — including the oil, the gas, the packet and the spoon. Add it up. Then take your price and subtract.

Do this for every item on your board. It takes an evening, once.

Almost everyone who does this for the first time finds the same two things: one item is barely paying for itself, and one item is carrying the whole day. That changes what you push, what goes at the top of the board, what you make more of, and which single price needs to move.

You can type the ingredient list into Claude — a free AI assistant you open in a phone browser — as roughly as you like, and ask it to work out the cost per plate and your margin at your current price. Check the arithmetic against what you know. It can be confidently wrong, and this number matters too much to take on trust.

2. Prep to the day, not to habit

For three weeks, note three things at the end of each day: the day of the week, the weather, and roughly how much of each dish you sold.

Rain, exam season, paydays, festivals and match days all move it, and they move it in patterns you half-know already. Writing it down turns half-knowing into a number you can prep against.

After three weeks, hand the notes to Claude:

Here are three weeks of daily sales from a street food stall, with the weather and the day. How much of each dish should I prepare for a normal Wednesday, and what changes when it rains?

It is doing simple arithmetic on your own notes. That is exactly the kind of work these tools are reliable for — and it is also why the notes matter more than the AI does.

3. Make the same plate taste the same every time

Your regulars come back for a specific taste. The day a helper makes it, or you are rushed, or you buy a different brand of one thing, it moves — and people notice before they say anything.

Write the recipe down once, in weights and counts rather than in handfuls. One card per dish. Keep it where whoever is cooking can see it.

This is the least exciting thing on this page and it protects the thing your whole stall runs on. If you want help turning "a bit of this" into grams, describe how you make it to Claude and ask it to write it out as a measured recipe card — then cook it once against the card and correct it.

4. Be findable

If somebody two streets away searches for your kind of food, you want to exist.

A free business listing with your location, your opening hours and three good photographs does most of that work. Take the photos in daylight, of the actual food, close up. Update the hours when they change — wrong hours are worse than no listing, because someone walks over and finds you shut.

Ask Claude to write the listing description in the languages your customers speak, and to suggest a menu board that reads clearly from a few steps back.

Do not

• Pay anyone who calls offering to "get you to the top of search". The listing is free and takes twenty minutes.
• Give your bank details to a delivery-platform recruiter who contacted you first. Go to the platform yourself if you want to join one.
• Act on a number an AI gave you that does not match what you remember taking. Check it. You are right more often than it is about your own stall.

If you try one thing

Work out the cost of one plate — your best-selling one. It is a single evening's work and it usually changes a price the same week.