A Friday night in Fort Lauderdale. Your truck is parked in a brewery lot, the fryer is up to temperature, and a customer reaching for a tray catches her foot on the step below the serving window. She goes down on the asphalt and breaks a wrist. You turn the claim in and find out which policy you actually bought. The commercial auto policy on the truck covered the drive to the lot. It has nothing to say about what happened while the truck sat with its wheels chocked and its awning out.
That split is the most expensive thing to get wrong when you insure a food truck in Florida. One vehicle, two unrelated policies, and the boundary between them falls almost exactly at the serving window.
Two Policies Cover One Truck
A commercial auto policy responds to the truck as a vehicle. Driving it, parking it, hitting something with it, having something hit it. A general liability policy responds to the business you run out of it. Someone gets hurt at your window, your food makes a customer sick, a propane flare-up scorches a tent you were parked under. Neither policy reaches into the other's territory, and a carrier that writes one will not quietly cover the other.
- Commercial auto: liability for a crash on I-95, physical damage to the truck itself, towing, and in many cases the generator and equipment permanently installed in the vehicle.
- General liability: bodily injury to customers at or near the truck, damage you do to a host's property, and products liability if someone gets sick from what you served.
- Neither one: the cooking equipment as business property away from the vehicle, breakdown of the fryer or the refrigeration, spoiled inventory, or lost income while the truck is off the road.
A personal auto policy will not cover a vehicle used to run a business, and most will not cover a vehicle with commercial cooking equipment installed at all. If your truck is on a personal policy today, assume the first serious claim is denied.
Florida Licenses You, and Your City Mostly Cannot
Your license comes from the state. A mobile food dispensing vehicle is licensed as a public food service establishment under Florida Statute 509.241, by the Department of Business and Professional Regulation's Division of Hotels and Restaurants. New builds and conversions go through plan review before construction and an initial inspection before you serve anyone.
Florida Statute 509.102 then preempts local licensing. A city, county or other local government cannot require a separate license, registration or permit to operate a mobile food dispensing vehicle in its jurisdiction beyond the state license, cannot charge a fee beyond the state one, and cannot ban mobile food vehicles across the whole of its territory. The section does not apply to port authorities, aviation authorities, airports or seaports, so an airport concession is a different conversation.
What local government does still control is where and when you park, and that is where insurance requirements reach you. Broward and Miami-Dade municipalities regulate site use, hours and special events, and a private lot owner can demand whatever certificate of insurance they like as a condition of letting you in. The state preemption covers your license. It does not cover your landlord's paperwork.
The Weight on Your Registration Changes the Legal Minimum
Florida's baseline financial responsibility floor is thin: $10,000 of property damage liability and $10,000 of personal injury protection, with no bodily injury liability required at all. Once a commercial motor vehicle crosses 26,000 pounds gross vehicle weight, Florida Statute 627.7415 adds a real floor on top of that, and a violation is a noncriminal traffic infraction.
| Gross vehicle weight | Combined BI and PD liability required |
|---|---|
| 26,000 lb to under 35,000 lb | $50,000 per occurrence |
| 35,000 lb to under 44,000 lb | $100,000 per occurrence |
| 44,000 lb and above | $300,000 per occurrence |
Most step vans and converted box trucks sit under 26,000 pounds, so section 627.7415 never applies to them and the only legal requirement is that thin state floor. Read that as a warning rather than a saving. A loaded truck with propane aboard that rear-ends a car on University Drive generates a claim that $10,000 of property damage liability does not begin to absorb, and the owner pays the rest personally. The practical starting point we write is $1,000,000 of combined single limit on the auto, and more when the truck runs highway miles to events outside Broward County.
What It Costs to Insure a Truck in Broward and Miami-Dade
Published national figures cluster in fairly consistent ranges, and South Florida sits at the upper end of them because of traffic density, theft frequency and catastrophe exposure. Treat these as planning numbers, not quotes.
| Coverage | Typical annual range | What drives it |
|---|---|---|
| General liability | $500 to $1,500 | Sales volume, alcohol service, event count |
| Commercial auto | $1,400 to $4,800 per truck | Truck value, weight, driving records, radius |
| Equipment and inland marine | $300 to $900 | Replacement value of the cooking line |
| Workers' compensation | Rated on payroll | Class code and payroll, once required |
| Full package, one truck | $2,500 to $8,000 | All of the above combined |
Two things move the commercial auto number more than operators expect. The first is who drives: one driver with a clean record on a single truck rates very differently from a rotating crew of part-timers. The second is the radius. A truck that works Sunrise and Plantation lots rates below one that runs to Orlando festivals every other weekend, and carriers ask the question directly.
The Coverages Operators Skip and Regret
The two policies above are the floor, not the policy. These are the lines that show up in claims we see and in gaps we find on existing certificates.
- Equipment and inland marine on the cooking line. A griddle, fryer, hood, refrigeration and generator add up fast, and a theft or a fire that destroys the build is a five-figure loss that general liability does not touch.
- Equipment breakdown. A compressor failure in August is not a covered peril under a standard property form. Breakdown coverage, usually written with spoilage, is what pays for the part and the inventory.
- Products liability. Foodborne illness claims come through the products-completed operations side of general liability. Confirm it is included rather than excluded, because some cheap mobile-vendor policies carve it out.
- Fire suppression and propane disclosure. Carriers price a truck very differently depending on whether it has a working hood suppression system. Answering the question honestly at bind is also what keeps the claim payable later.
- Business income. If the truck is off the road for six weeks after a crash, the revenue stops but the loan payment does not. Loss of income coverage on a mobile unit is cheap and almost never bought.
- Hired and non-owned auto. The moment an employee runs for propane or supplies in their own car, your general liability does not respond and their personal policy may not either.
Your Host Will Ask for a Certificate Before You Plug In
Commissaries, breweries, business parks, festival organizers and catering clients all gate access on a certificate of insurance, and they rarely just want to see that you have one. The usual asks are a $1,000,000 general liability limit, the host named as additional insured, and a waiver of subrogation in their favor. Those are two separate endorsements that do two different things, and a certificate that shows one while the contract demands both gets rejected at the gate, usually on the morning of the event.
Get your standard requirements into the policy at bind rather than chasing endorsements per event. A blanket additional insured endorsement, where the carrier will write one, saves the Friday-afternoon phone call. Our commercial insurance page covers how general liability, property and auto fit together on one account, and our business owners policy page explains when packaging them is cheaper than buying them separately.
Workers' Comp Starts at Your Fourth Set of Hands
A food truck is non-construction for Florida workers' compensation purposes, so coverage becomes mandatory at four or more employees, counting corporate officers and LLC members in that total. Non-construction sole proprietors and partners are not counted unless they elect to be included. Officers and LLC members who can document ownership can apply to the Division of Workers' Compensation for an exemption, and an approved exemption keeps them out of the count.
Going without required coverage in Florida invites a stop-work order and a penalty built on a multiple of the premium you avoided, not a flat fine. For a truck that lives on weekend revenue, the stop-work order is the part that hurts.
Watch the count as you grow. Two owners and two part-time window staff is four. The threshold does not care that two of them work six hours a week.
Hurricane Season Is the One Advantage You Have
A restaurant in Miami cannot move. You can, and that is worth real money in September. Drive the truck inland or into a garage ahead of a named storm and the wind exposure that drives Florida property rates largely goes away. Your policy still needs to say so, though: physical damage on the commercial auto is what pays for wind and flood damage to the vehicle, and comprehensive is not automatic on a commercial truck the way most owners assume.
The exposures that stay are the ones on the ground. Inventory in a commissary freezer that loses power, a generator stolen out of a storage yard, and the four weeks of lost revenue after a storm when nobody is booking events. Those are property, breakdown and business income questions, and they are the ones to settle before June rather than in the middle of a cone.
If you are running on one policy today, find out which one it is. Trucks insured only for driving are common, and the serving window is where the claims actually happen.