Saturday. Six in the morning. Bristol Harbourside.

The inverter is humming, the LPG manifold has just been signed off by a Gas Safe engineer the afternoon before, and there are three hours until the serving hatch opens. I've been stood in enough trailers at this hour to know the feeling - that quiet, slightly anxious pause before the first 200 people of the day queue up for a burger. Coffee in one hand. Clipboard in the other. Checking gas pressure, bottle rotation, fridge temps, and whether the griddle is up to 230°C.

I'm Andrew Pickersgill, MD at eCatering. I've spent more than three decades helping UK operators fit out kitchens - restaurant, pub, canteen, festival, and, more and more over the last ten years, food trucks. This guide is what I'd tell a friend who rang me asking what the best catering equipment for a food truck actually looks like in 2026, in pounds, in a real 5m × 2.5m trailer, pulling up at Bristol Harbourside or Brighton Seafront on a Saturday.

No fluff. Real kit. Real prices (ex VAT, April 2026). And a bit of hard-won advice on the bits people forget.

What matters most when choosing equipment for a food truck

A food truck isn't a small restaurant. It's its own discipline.

Space, power, weight, workflow - they all push back on the kit list the minute you try to cram in a full-service cook line. If you've come from a bricks-and-mortar site, the temptation is to shrink your restaurant down onto four wheels. Don't. The trucks that win Saturday trade are the ones built around constraints, not around menus.

Here's what actually matters:

• Space. A typical UK trailer is 5m long by 2.5m wide. You've got one working wall, maybe an L. The serving hatch eats another corner. Every piece of kit needs to earn its footprint twice - once in cooking, once in prep.

• Power. Mains 3-phase? Rare. What you'll run, day in day out, is LPG for anything that heats, and a Honda EU22i 2.2kW generator (or similar) for the low-draw electrics - fridge, toaster, EPOS, lighting. That's your ceiling. More on what 2.2kW actually handles further down.

• Water. 50L fresh tank, 50L grey. It goes faster than you think. Factor in hand-wash, rinse, and the odd spill.

• Extraction. You won't be installing a DW172-spec canopy in a trailer. You'll be running 12V fans under a compact canopy - enough to move steam, heat and grease away from the operator, without drawing half your generator load.

• Weight. Every kilo matters. A Falcon 30L fryer weighs around 100kg - marginal for most tow setups once you add LPG bottles and fresh water. Check your trailer rating before you order.

• Workflow. One or two operators. A 4-hour peak. The hatch is the pass. Everything should be one step, one reach, one pivot.

• Gas Safe. Commercial LPG installations need a Gas Safe registered engineer, commercial ticket, and an annual recert. Non-negotiable. HSE and the event organiser will both ask.

• Winter. Condensation on stainless, water tank freeze, bottle performance dropping below 5°C. A truck that trades year-round is a different beast to a summer-only setup.

Get those eight right, and everything else - burners, fryers, fridges - slots in around them. Get them wrong and it doesn't matter how good your chef is.

Our recommended equipment - Entry, Core and Premium

Three tiers. Real prices. Ex VAT. April 2026.

Entry tier - £3,000 to £6,000 (~£3,500 total)

For a one-menu-item trailer. Think single-concept: a burger, loaded fries, or churros. You're testing the market, testing yourself, and keeping the tow weight honest.

• Italinox Arisco 2-burner LPG griddle - £533.87

• Quattro Twin 2x6L countertop fryer (FCE014) - £99.99 (budget workhorse, plugs straight in)

• Quattro 1/1 bain marie - £98.83

• Contender 130L undercounter fridge - £367.80

• Bartscher toaster / panini grill - ~£150

• Small wares, propane bottles, signage - ~£700

• Prep counter + stainless shelving - ~£400

• KINN starter cleaning pack (eco, non-tainting) - ~£120

• Buffer for the things you'll forget - ~£1,000

This is lean. It works. Loads of UK operators have started at exactly this spec and grown from there.

Browse our Quattro collection for the griddle-and-fryer backbone at Entry.

Core tier - £6,000 to £15,000 (~£9,500 total)

150-250 covers at a Saturday event. This is where most serious food trucks land. You've got a proper menu, a cold drop for drinks, and the kit to turn 40 covers an hour in the lunch window without the fryer dying.

• Archway or Quattro LPG 3-burner chargrill - ~£900

• Quattro 24L Gas Single Tank Twin Basket fryer (FSN003) - £574.99 (fast recovery, twin basket for loaded fries + onion rings)

• Bartscher full-size bain marie - £141.65

• Contender 220L bottle cooler - £381 (cold drop - drinks pay the rent)

• 2x Contender 130L undercounter fridges - £735.60

• Compact extraction canopy (12V fan) - ~£600

• Gas interlock + Gas Safe install cert - ~£400

• Prep counter + sandwich counter - ~£900

• Honda EU22i 2.2kW generator + LPG bottles - ~£1,400

• Small wares + plumbing - ~£1,500

• KINN cleaning programme (3-month) - ~£350

The jump from Entry to Core isn't just more kit - it's redundancy. Two fridges instead of one. Interlocked gas. A generator that won't stall at the worst possible moment. If you're trading every Saturday, or doing Manchester markets, Edinburgh Fringe pitches, or Glastonbury, Core is where you need to be.

For cold-side kit (the bit most operators under-spec), browse Contender. For LPG burners, grills and fryers, start with gas equipment.

Premium tier - £15,000 to £30,000+

Bespoke fit-out. A second trailer. A year-round operator with multiple pitches and a brand to protect.

• Morclean or bespoke stainless fit-out - ~£5,000-£10,000

• LPG 4-burner range + charcoal grill - ~£2,500

• Twin 2x19L LPG fryer - ~£800-£1,200

• Full refrigeration (undercounter + upright) - ~£2,500

• Slush / waffle / crepe equipment if sweet-led - ~£1,500

• EPOS + card terminal + shutter - ~£1,500

• Branded canopy + bespoke counter - ~£3,000

• Gas Safe + LPG safety fit-out - ~£1,000

• KINN full programme - ~£1,200

At Premium you're not just buying equipment. You're buying reliability, brand, and the ability to scale into a second rig without re-learning every mistake.

Real-world scenario: 200 covers at a Saturday event

Let's make it concrete.

Bristol Harbourside, mid-June. Or Brighton Seafront in August. Doesn't matter - the numbers are similar. Gates open at 11, close at 5. Six-hour trading window. You're aiming for 200 covers across the day. The lunch window - 12 to 2 - is where it lives or dies. Forty covers an hour, back-to-back, for two hours.

Menu: three flagship burgers, loaded fries, a decent cold drop of drinks. Tight. Repeatable. No dish over 90 seconds from order to hatch.

Here's what Core tier actually does across that day:

• LPG. One 19kg propane bottle, with a reserve swapped in at changeover. That covers the griddle, chargrill and fryer for the full 6 hours with headroom. The reason you want the interlock: if pressure drops, everything shuts down safely. Not dramatically. Safely.

• Generator. The Honda EU22i at 2.2kW happily carries your two Contender fridges, the bottle cooler, toaster (if it's only on intermittently), EPOS, card terminal and LED lighting. It won't carry an electric fryer or induction hob on top of that. Don't try.

• Fryer recovery. This is the number most operators miss. The Quattro FSN003 24L twin-basket recovers its set temperature in around 60 seconds after a full basket drop. That's the difference between crisp fries at cover 38 and soggy fries at cover 22.

• Griddle thermal mass. A 2-burner LPG griddle needs 15 minutes to come up to 230°C from cold. Don't light it at 10:45 for an 11:00 opening. Light it at 10:15 and cook a staff burger while you're waiting.

• Workflow. Two operators. One on hot line (griddle, fryer, assembly). One on hatch (call-out, drinks, card, pass). The bain marie sits between them - cheese, onions, sauces, buns - so nobody crosses the other.

That's 200 covers done. Not dramatic. Just boring, reliable repetition - which is exactly what you want.

Exclusive brands worth considering - Quattro, Contender and KINN

We stock a lot of brands. Three of them we've built ourselves, because we weren't satisfied with what the market was offering UK operators.

Quattro is our budget workhorse range. Griddles, fryers, bain maries, chargrills. If your margin is tight (and in a food truck, it always is), Quattro is where you get proper commercial kit without paying for a badge. The FCE014 twin countertop fryer and FSN003 24L gas fryer in the Core tier are exactly this: built for volume, priced for a realistic startup.

Contender is mid-range, and it's almost entirely what we recommend for the cold side of a food truck - undercounter fridges, bottle coolers, ice machines if you're running slush or cocktails. Reliable, well-specced, reasonable spare parts availability.

KINN is our premium eco-cleaning range. No cooking kit - it's cleaning chemistry. Degreasers, sanitisers, surface cleaners that don't taint food. A food truck without a proper cleaning programme gets tired fast, and the first thing an environmental health officer looks at is your grease. A quick note - if you visit the KINN collection and see cooking equipment, that's a taxonomy issue on our end we're fixing. KINN is eco-cleaning. Ask us on chat and we'll point you at the right pack.

Finance options - how to spread the cost

Most food truck operators don't have £9,500 sitting in a current account. Nor should you - working capital for stock and marketing matters more in month one than owning every piece of kit outright.

We offer three routes:

• iwocaPay. Between £150 and £30,000. Spread over 3, 6 or 12 months. Quick decisions. Good for Entry and most Core builds.

• Leasing. Over 36, 48 or 60 months. Monthly fixed. Kit stays an operating expense rather than a big capital hit. Usually the best option for Core and Premium.

• PayPal Credit. For smaller top-up purchases - smallwares, a replacement fryer, a KINN restock.

Worked example: a Core tier build at £9,500 ex VAT, leased over 60 months, works out at roughly £190/month. That's one slightly better Saturday a week covering the entire cook line. When you frame it like that, the maths gets a lot friendlier.

Full details on our finance page.

When to bring in a Key Account Manager (Andy Whitehead)

Some of what I've written above you can work through yourself. Some of it - specifically the LPG spec, the extraction design, and the weight-and-power balance - is worth getting a second pair of eyes on before you commit.

That's what our Key Account Managers are for. Andy Whitehead heads up our commercial side, and he's spent years speccing rigs for operators trading at Bristol Harbourside, Brighton Seafront, Manchester markets, Edinburgh Fringe and Glastonbury. He doesn't sell you kit. He asks what you're cooking, where you're trading, what you're towing with, and builds the list backwards from there.

Here's Andy in his own words:

"The difference between a food truck that prints money and one that stalls is rarely the food. It's the extraction, the LPG spec and whether the fryer recovers in 60 seconds. I've spec'd rigs for Bristol Harbourside and Brighton Seafront operators - the ones who win Saturday trade got those three right before they bolted the griddle down."

- Andy Whitehead, Commercial Director, eCatering

If you're building a first truck, or scaling into a second, have a conversation with Andy before you place an order. Meet him (and the rest of the team) on our meet the team page.

FAQ

How much does it cost to kit out a food truck in the UK?

Roughly £3,500 for a one-menu-item Entry build, £9,500 for a Core rig doing 150-250 covers on a Saturday, and £15,000 to £30,000+ for a Premium or bespoke fit-out. All ex VAT, April 2026 pricing. Those are kit-only numbers - trailer, tow vehicle, licences and insurance are separate.

LPG or electric equipment for a food truck?

LPG, almost always, for anything that heats. A 2.2kW generator can't carry a 3kW electric fryer, let alone an induction hob. LPG gives you the thermal grunt you need in a compact space without tripling your power spec. Keep electric for fridges, toasters, EPOS and lighting.

What power draw can a standard 2.2kW generator handle?

The Honda EU22i (or equivalent) runs comfortably at around 1.8kW continuous. That covers two undercounter fridges, a bottle cooler, an intermittent toaster, EPOS, card terminal and lighting. It won't carry heat kit - don't try to run an electric griddle, panini grill and fryer off the same generator and expect it to last the season.

Do I need a Gas Safe certificate for a food truck?

Yes. Any commercial LPG installation in the UK must be installed and certified by a Gas Safe registered engineer with a commercial mobile catering ticket. It also needs annual recertification. Event organisers will ask for your current cert before you pitch up - no cert, no trading.

How do I plan extraction in a compact space?

Think 12V fans under a low-profile canopy, not a full DW172-spec system. You want enough airflow to clear steam and grease from the operator's face without over-drawing on your generator. Canopy over the griddle and fryer, extracting upward and outward - typically a single 12V fan rated 200-400 m³/hr does the job in a 5m trailer. Keep the canopy cleanable - grease traps need emptying weekly, sometimes more.

How do I winterise a food truck?

Three things. One, insulate the fresh water tank and run a low-wattage tank heater to stop freeze. Two, manage condensation - a small wall-mounted extractor or dehumidifier prevents stainless sweating overnight and rust forming on hinges. Three, keep LPG bottles out of direct cold wind where possible - propane vaporisation drops below 5°C, and a cold bottle gives you weak pressure exactly when you're trying to cook lunch.

Closing

Food trucks are one of the best businesses in UK catering right now. Low overheads. Direct customer contact. Margin, if you run them well. The operators I see thriving - Bristol, Brighton, Manchester, Glastonbury, Edinburgh - aren't the ones with the flashiest kit. They're the ones who respected the constraints, spec'd their LPG properly, and bought equipment that recovers under pressure.

If you take one thing from this guide: get the LPG, the extraction and the fryer recovery right before you worry about anything else. The griddle, the fridge, the branding - those follow.

If you want a second opinion on a kit list, drop us a line. Talk to Andy. Browse Quattro, Contender and KINN. Read our guide to starting a successful street food business if you're at day one, or our commercial kitchen equipment list if you're building the full picture. If you're adding summer events into the mix, the best catering equipment for summer fairs and festivals is worth a read.

Now - go and open that hatch.

- Andrew

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Prices shown excluding VAT as of April 2026 and subject to change. All LPG installations require a Gas Safe registered commercial engineer and annual recertification. Always check weight and power capacity before fitting.