Trend pieces this year keep landing on the same number: something like nine in ten London food trucks are now card or QR only, with no cash accepted at all. Treat the precise figure with the caution any survey number deserves — but the direction is not in doubt, and it matches what we see.

Why it happened faster in food vans than almost anywhere else

A van has specific problems with cash that a shop does not.

  • There is nowhere safe to put it. A day's takings in a vehicle parked in a field is a genuine risk, and everybody trading knows someone it has happened to.
  • Change is a supply chain. A float has to be got, counted, kept, and restocked mid-service on a busy day, usually by the person who should be cooking.
  • Banking it costs a trip. Branch closures have made depositing cash a genuine errand rather than a five-minute walk.
  • It slows the hatch. Counting out change is measurably slower than a tap, and on a queue of thirty that difference is the difference.
  • The books are cleaner. Card and QR payments reconcile themselves. With Making Tax Digital now biting for sole traders over £50k, a payment trail that arrives in software already is worth more than it used to be.

What changes at the hatch

The interesting part is not that cash disappeared. It is what replaced it.

A card machine is a straight substitution — the customer still queues, still reaches the hatch, still waits while it processes. You have swapped a float for a rental fee and a bit of speed.

Letting people order and pay from their own phone is a different thing entirely. The order arrives in the kitchen before the customer has reached the hatch. There is no card machine to rent, no app for them to download, and the payment and the order are the same action. What used to be two queues — one to order, one to pay — stops being a queue at all.

Once a van has worked that way for a season, going back to a card machine and a float feels like a step backwards rather than a safety net.

The case for keeping a float anyway

Plenty of traders who are effectively cashless still keep twenty or thirty pounds in the van, and they are not being sentimental.

  • Signal. A festival field with ten thousand phones on it is not a reliable data environment. Most modern systems handle it, but a total outage at a remote site is not unheard of.
  • The customer who genuinely has no card. Rarer every year, but it is still a sale, and turning one away in front of a queue is not a good look.
  • The event that pays you in cash. Some organisers still do.

A float you never touch is not a cost. Announcing yourself as cash-only-when-it-all-goes-wrong is very different from running a cash operation.

Where it lands

The honest summary: cash has stopped being the default and become the exception, and the vans that moved earliest mostly did it for the queue rather than the accounting. The accounting turned out to be the bigger benefit.

If you are still weighing it up, the question worth asking is not card machine or cash. It is whether your customers need to reach the hatch at all before they can order — because that is the change that actually moves the numbers.