SPOKANE, Wash. — You aren’t the only one hurting from high gas prices, it’s impacting the food truck industry, too.
Rising costs are forcing owners to make some tough choices, such as how far they will travel for events or if they need to charge customers more.
Some food trucks run on regular gasoline, but others are pulled by diesel trucks.
The owner of the Indigenous Eats food truck said it cost around $300 recently to fill up the tank. High diesel prices also mean food is more expensive to ship, so even the brick-and-mortar restaurant is feeling the pressure.
“Everything is adding on to each other with the continued increase in food supplies and now, increase in employee staffing costs and now the increase in fuel,” Slagle said.
Indigenous Eats added the food truck a little more than a year ago with the hope of getting more exposure, but now, fuel prices have limited their radius.
“We’re not only losing out on sales opportunities, but we’re really losing out on creating that community and bringing that with us as well,” Slagle said.
The Two Brothers Food Truck has a front row seat to the rising costs, located right next to a gas station on Hamilton St.
Owner Mandeep Sharma says customers often talk about how expensive gas has gotten.
“Every day the prices are coming up,” Sharma said.
“We know when minimum wage is going up. We can plan for that. We just can’t plan for when it will surge, when it will come back down, if we’re going to get any relief,” Jenny Slagle said.
The economic storm has forced menu prices up, which owners say is often a last resort.
“It’s not like an automatic solution for us to automatically raise our prices because then we’re also impacting our customers again,” Slagle said.
Right now, Slagle says the plan is to continue to serve customers as best they can while encouraging people to continue to support local businesses.
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