Decide with data,
not assumptions.

Coffee cart and food truck · Spain · Decision report on permits, unit format, service capacity, diary of dates and viability

Decision report for the entrepreneur or small business considering setting up a mobile coffee unit in Spain —cart, tricycle, trailer or van— and about to turn their savings into the vehicle before knowing whether they will be allowed to serve at all. The question that governs the work is not «where do I stand and how much do I pay?», but «is there anywhere I will be authorised to serve prepared coffee, how many trading days a year can I actually fill, and is what is left after paying myself for every hour money, or an accounting illusion?». It includes the named audit of the venta ambulante (street trading) by-law and the public-domain occupation regime of eight municipalities read one by one —Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Seville, Málaga, Zaragoza, Bilbao and San Sebastián/Donostia, with a cut-off of 4 August 2026—, with the unaudited universe declared in every sentence: Spain has more than 8,100 municipalities and the rest have not been read. It brings the pitch fee measured by actual auction rather than by reserve price —in the same tender and on the same day in Zaragoza, a site with a €23,900 reserve was awarded at €72,014 with fifteen bids while another at €5,600 closed at €6,000 with one—, the physics of the format with the two constraints that are not negotiable (the 750 kg maximum authorised mass, weighed with the tanks full and not unladen, and the architecture of the espresso machine as against its number of groups), the three capacity magnitudes almost nobody distinguishes —sustained rate, fifteen-minute burst and peak-hour capacity— and the curve that turns drinks demanded into drinks served, IVA (Spanish VAT) with its two rates on a mixed menu, RETA 2026 (Spain's self-employed social security scheme) closed against the BOE, and the economics of a business that turns out to depend on the calendar rather than on footfall. Five operating archetypes run through the same engine —private land, public highway, events, recurring corporate and seasonal— with their CAPEX built line by line, their annual result, their net present value and the euros per hour left to the owner, with the eleven-hour door-to-door working day deducted at gross employer cost before any talk of return. Reproducible calculation engine with 99 assumptions traced one by one to their source, their date and their confidence grade, a tornado of twelve levers moved ±20%, eleven risks with indicator and threshold, three gaps declared rather than filled —nobody in Spain publishes how many coffees a cart sells in a day, and a counting protocol is delivered instead— and an adversarial section that opens by knocking down eight of the report's own statements. Scope: Spain. 2026 data · Edition 7.