Bozeman readers voted a food truck the best burger in town. Not a restaurant, a truck. Cholms Burger took the 2025 Bozeman’s Choice award for Burgers, working smash patties and hand cut fries out of the food truck court on North 7th Avenue. In a city with Burger Bob’s on Main Street since 1982 and Montana Ale Works down the block, the readers picked the truck. That is the market this 16ft build is rolling into, and it explains why we get more burger enquiries out of Gallatin County than almost anywhere else in Montana.
The truck itself is a 16ft box on a step van chassis, and it left our shop in plain white. No wrap, no logo, nothing but a clean shell with the hood cap on the roof and the service window cut into the passenger side. Some operators want us to handle graphics before delivery. This one wanted the shell finished and the wrap done at home. That is a perfectly good way to do it, and if you are still settling on a name or a logo it is the better way, because a wrap you commit to in month two of a build is a wrap you may not love in month ten.
The cook line is built around recovery, not peak output
Everybody shopping for a burger truck asks about the griddle. Almost nobody asks about recovery, which is the thing that actually decides how many tickets you clear at a rush. A griddle that holds 375 degrees with four patties on it and drops to 300 with twelve on it is a griddle that turns a six minute line into a twenty minute line, and in Bozeman the altitude makes that worse before you have cooked anything.
This truck runs a 24 inch LP range with the griddle top and an oven underneath, a two burner stove alongside it, and two 40 pound fryers. The oven under the griddle earns its space on a burger truck more than people expect. It toasts buns in trays, it holds par cooked product between waves, and it saves you from adding a separate salamander that eats wall space and propane you do not have to spare.
Two fryers rather than one is the call we push on almost every burger build. One fryer means fries and anything else fried share the same oil and the same recovery window. Two means you can hold one at fry temperature and run the second for chicken, onion rings or a weekly special without cross flavouring your fries or waiting out a temperature swing after every basket drop. A three pan electric steam table sits at the end of the line for chilli, cheese sauce, braised toppings and anything that would otherwise tie up a burner.
Cold storage sized so nobody turns around
There are four separate cold units on this truck and that is deliberate. A 36 inch chef base sits directly under the cooking equipment, which is the single most useful piece of refrigeration on a burger truck. Patties live at hip height under the griddle, so the cook reaches down instead of turning around. On a 16ft floor plan, every turn you remove from the patty cycle is worth more than any equipment upgrade.
Above that, a 27 inch refrigerated prep table holds cheese, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles and sauces in the rail with cold storage underneath. Behind the line, a full size standup refrigerator and a separate freezer carry the day’s backstock and frozen fries. Four units means a compressor failure costs you one category of product rather than your entire service, which matters a lot more when your nearest service tech is a drive away.
Stainless everywhere, diamond plate underfoot
The cooking wall is stainless steel and so is everything else in the box. On a coffee or bakery build we will often run FRP on the non cooking walls because it is lighter and cheaper. On a burger truck we do not, because burger trucks throw grease. Aerosolised beef fat travels further than people think, it finds every seam, and after two seasons it is the difference between wiping a wall down and scrubbing a wall. Stainless wipes.
The floor is aluminium diamond plate across the full length. It handles standing water, dropped baskets and a daily mop without dulling. LED strips run through the interior and along the exterior, which does real work in Montana in November when you are serving at five in the afternoon in the dark.
The service window
Five feet of window on the passenger side with an awning door, self closing doors and a bug screen. The self closing doors are the part that matters in Bozeman specifically. In a warm climate they are a nicety. Here, an open sliding window with a diesel heater running behind it is money going straight out into the parking lot, and Gallatin Field records roughly 198 nights a year at or below freezing on the 1991 to 2020 NOAA normals. Doors that shut themselves between tickets are the cheapest heat retention you will ever buy.
Water, and the one number to settle before plan review
The plumbing is our standard package: a hand wash sink, a three compartment sink, an 8 gallon water heater, and a 30 gallon fresh and 40 gallon grey tank mounted under the truck where they can be filled and dumped without anybody climbing inside.
Here is the number to settle before you order, and it is the one Bozeman specific spec I would flag to any buyer. Gallatin City-County Health Department’s Food Establishment Plan Review Packet states the fresh water tank must be 40gal, and the waste tank must be 15% larger than the fresh water tank to be considered as a self-sufficient mobile unit, which puts the grey minimum at 46 gallons. Montana’s own DPHHS mobile guidance lands in the same place for any unit doing food processing with handwashing and sanitising, calling for at least 151 litres, or 40 gallons, with wastewater sized 15 percent larger.
So if the truck is going to be licensed as a self contained unit in Gallatin County, tell your builder at order time and get 40 fresh and 46 grey. It is a cheap change on the drawing and an expensive one after the box is closed up. Trucks working off a licensed commissary in counties with a lower floor run our standard 30 and 40 without an issue, which is why we do not treat tank size as a house standard. It is a destination decision.
The winter side of the water system deserves its own thought. Gallatin Field’s January normal low is 10.2 degrees and the station averages about 24 nights a year at or below zero. UltraHeat, one of the common tank heater manufacturers, publishes a design and test benchmark of minus 11 degrees for its RV holding tank blankets. That is a manufacturer figure rather than a code standard, and it is worth reading against those two dozen sub zero nights, because a bolt on pad sized for an RV in Denver is marginal here. A heated and insulated tank compartment is the build answer. Drain down between services is the operational answer, and it remains the only method with no failure mode that depends on shore power or battery state.
Propane: the cap, and the thing that actually runs out
Bozeman Fire’s Mobile Food Vehicle requirements cap LP at a maximum aggregate capacity of 200 pounds under 2021 IFC 319.8.1. Tanks stay upright and secured, never on the roof and never inside the vehicle, not extending past the bumper, with impact protection and a flexible connector between the regulator outlet and the fixed piping. Refuelling happens after event hours only, and the NO SMOKING signage has to be in four inch lettering. There is also a listed LP gas alarm inside the vehicle near the LP components.
Note that the national standard is more generous. NFPA 58 Chapter 16 allows 478 pounds of water capacity for mobile food units under 300,000 BTU per hour of total appliance input. Bozeman’s 200 pound cap is the binding number, and it collides with the other winter problem.
You do not run out of propane in a Montana winter. You run out of vaporisation. A cylinder is a small boiler, and the liquid has to absorb heat through the wetted tank wall to flash into vapour. Published continuous draw figures put a full 100 pound cylinder at roughly 113,000 BTU per hour at 0 degrees and 167,000 at 20 degrees. Drop the same cylinder to half full and it falls to about 64,000 at 0 degrees. Two full cylinders at the 200 pound cap give you around 226,000 BTU per hour on a zero degree morning. The same two cylinders at half give you about 128,000, which is under the load of a griddle and fryer line running hard.
What that looks like in service is low burner flames and frost creeping up the cylinders about an hour into a hard push, usually right at the worst possible moment. The fix is not a bigger tank, because the fire code has already capped you. The fix is swapping cylinders before they drop below half through the cold months and pulling the actual nameplate BTU figures off your appliance spec sheets before you commit to a cylinder plan. Add them up, put them next to the 0 degree column, and you will know in five minutes whether your winter mornings are going to work.
Power: a 12kW generator that is not 12kW in Bozeman
The truck carries a 12kW generator, and Bozeman sits at about 4,811 feet by the USGS elevation service. Cummins Onan’s own RV generator handbook derates output 3.5 percent for every 1,000 feet above 500 feet, plus another 1 percent for every 10 degrees above 77 degrees Fahrenheit. Run that at Bozeman’s elevation and you are down roughly 15 percent before you account for heat, and July’s normal high at Gallatin Field is 85.4 degrees. A 12kW nameplate is realistically about 10.2kW on a hot afternoon in July.
That would be a simple problem if you could just order a bigger generator, except Bozeman is one of the few cities in the country where the genset is a compliance item rather than a preference. The city’s mobile vending FAQ limits generators to a maximum 60 dBA rating, and the licence application requires the generator’s make, model and decibel rating to be declared. So you need more nameplate to land the same usable output, and you cannot get there by going louder. Confirm the published dBA figure for whatever unit you are quoting before it is installed, not after.
The events add their own layer. The Bozeman Farmers’ Market states plainly that electricity and Wi-Fi are not available and that only whisper quiet generators are allowed, and only upon approval. Bozeman Fire also requires generators and fuel cans to be kept at least 12 feet from the unit under NFPA 96, which is a siting fact worth knowing before you rent a 10 foot wide event space. Our generator sizing guide walks through how we land on a number for a given equipment list.
Fire suppression and the clearances that shape the floor plan
The truck ships with a hood suppression system plus Class K and ABC extinguishers. Bozeman’s requirements document is unusually specific about what it wants to see at inspection, and most of it is worth knowing at design time rather than delivery time:
- Suppression activation must automatically shut off gas to the burners, and the service tag has to be less than six months old
- At least one 2A-10BC dry chemical extinguisher, tagged within 11 calendar months, mounted with the top between three and five feet above the floor. Plastic extinguishers are not accepted
- Class K wherever grease is used, one per four fryers
- Fryer to open flame separation of an 8 inch baffle or an 18 inch gap under NFPA 96
- A minimum 30 inch unobstructed egress aisle and 74 inches of clearance height
That last pair is the one that quietly decides your layout. Thirty inches of clear aisle on a 16ft truck with a cook line down one wall and refrigeration down the other is achievable, but only if it is planned from the first drawing. It is not something you retrofit. The fire inspection itself costs $225, is scheduled on 406-582-2350, and can be done on site or at Station 1 on East Oak Street. Fail it and you get 30 days to correct, and no City of Bozeman licence is issued until you pass.
What it actually costs to get legal in Bozeman
Montana’s licensing structure surprises people, because the licence is issued by the state but you cannot apply to the state. The DPHHS retail food licence application says it outright: the regulatory authority must submit applications with fees, and DPHHS will not accept applications directly from applicants. Your local health department does the plan review, runs the pre-operational inspection, completes the application and forwards it. So you are dealing with three bodies, in this order: Gallatin City-County Health, the City of Bozeman, and the state behind them.
The state fee changed in 2025 for the first time in sixteen years. House Bill 853, signed 13 May 2025, set a small mobile food establishment at $150 a year and a large one at $225. The split is by staffing, not by truck size: small means no more than two employees during peak hours, large means three or more. A 16ft burger truck running a two person line is $150. Add a third body at the lunch rush and you are at $225. Renewal is a fixed calendar deadline rather than an anniversary, before December 31 each year.
- State mobile food licence, small, two employees or fewer: $150
- Gallatin County application review, mobile unit: $252
- Gallatin County pre-operational inspection: $126
- Bozeman Mobile Vending Business License: $250
- Bozeman Fire mobile food vehicle inspection: $225
- Roughly $1,003 to open citywide, or about $1,253 with the additional $250 Downtown Mobile Vending License
Two honest caveats on that table. The county lines come from Gallatin’s published fee schedule dated 27 October 2018, which is still the only one on their site, and the state fee lines on that same document are definitively out of date because HB 853 replaced them. Call Environmental Health on 406-582-3120 and confirm the current county amounts before you budget. Second, the city’s $250 and $250 figures appear on a live page with no revision date and match what the Chronicle reported when Ordinance 1950 was adopted in 2017, so they may or may not have moved since.
Plan review is triggered by a new establishment, a remodel, or a change of ownership or location, and Gallatin wants the signed application, a water and wastewater summary form, the full proposed menu, floor plans, equipment spec sheets, and plumbing plans showing floor sinks and drain connections. Their stated turnaround goal is a response letter within 30 days, and the pre-operational inspection has to be booked at least seven days ahead. If the unit is not finished when they arrive, the re-inspection is billed hourly. Our guides on what permits you need state by state and how to pass a health inspection cover the general shape of this.
One more thing Gallatin says bluntly, because it catches people: a mobile unit must be fully self contained or use a licensed commissary kitchen, and absolutely no food prep or storage at any unlicensed kitchen or private residence is allowed. If your plan involves portioning patties in your own garage, it is not a plan.
Where a burger truck can actually park in Bozeman
This is the rule that reshapes the whole business model here. Under the city’s mobile vending FAQ, Main Street between Church and Grand Avenue is closed to mobile vendors from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. That is the prime downtown block, closed across the entire lunch and dinner window. Local streets are permitted except Mendenhall, Babcock, South Willson, North 7th and Main. Standard hours run 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m., extending to 2:30 a.m. in commercial districts. Parks and city property need separate departmental approval. Maximum unit length is 36 feet, so a 16ft truck is comfortably inside.
Strip out the best public curb in town during the hours you would want it, and Bozeman’s truck activity concentrates into private lots, courts and events. That is exactly what has happened.
The North 7th Avenue court is the largest cluster, with at least seven trucks including Cholms Burger, La Vaca Mariposa, Shawarma Bus, Ramire’s, A Lo Catracho, Taco Bus El Viejon and La Nueva Jalisco. The Bozeman Food Truck Park on West Babcock opened in June 2024 under brothers Christian and Trey James, who described wanting it to be a little bit of an incubator for these amazing chefs in town who start out in a food truck and hope to grow into brick and mortar. They also flagged the local problem honestly, telling KBZK that weather would be one of the big challenges and that they were looking at indoor seating so vendors could push into winter.
Breweries are the recurring revenue channel. Outlaw Brewing on North 27th publishes a standing weekly rotation, and a burger truck currently holds three of its six nights. Read that both ways: it is proof the format works in that lot, and it is an incumbent you would have to displace. Last Best Place, Bozeman Brewing and Bunkhouse have no kitchens and point patrons at nearby trucks, so those are the doors worth knocking on.
For events, Music on Main has the cleanest published economics anywhere in this market. Six consecutive Thursdays in July and early August, on Main between Rouse and Black, $125 per night for a food vendor, and the Downtown Business Association’s own application tells vendors that crowds of over 3,500 fill the streets and that you should be able to do 400-500 individual sales within the 2-hour event time. Cruisin’ on Main in August is also $125 and requires liability insurance naming both the DBA and the City. The Bozeman Farmers’ Market runs Tuesdays 5 to 8 at Lindley Park with dinner item booths at $35 a week or $455 for the season. And MSU football is the biggest crowd in the valley: 2025 home attendance averaged 21,877, fourth highest of any FCS program in the country, across six home dates in 2026.
Bozeman is two businesses in sequence, not one
This is the part operators from bigger cities get wrong, and it is worth building around. Yellowstone drew 4,762,988 recreation visits in 2025, and June, July and August alone accounted for 58.5 percent of that year. Bozeman Yellowstone International handled 2,809,419 passengers in 2025, up 6.3 percent, with August setting a record single month at 345,533. Summer is enormous.
Except Montana State is at its annual minimum during exactly that window. Fall classes do not start until August 26. So the 17,173 students who make up roughly 29 percent of the city’s population arrive right as the park empties out. Peak tourist season and peak student season barely overlap, which means a Bozeman truck is really serving two different customer bases back to back. The menu that moves at a Yellowstone gateway lunch in July is not the menu that moves at 10 p.m. near campus in October, and the truck has to work for both.
The two thin stretches are mid March to mid May and late October into December. April was the airport’s only month below the prior year in 2025, Yellowstone’s March and April average about half a percent and one percent of its annual visits, and MSU’s spring semester ends in early May right before tourist season starts. Plan cash flow around those gaps, not around the summer.
The Bozeman burger price ladder
We pulled these off first party menus in August 2026, and they tell you where the room is. Punk Rock Burger Shop across from MSU runs a flat $8 for every burger, with fries at $5. Backcountry Burger Bar on West Main is $11 to $16. Burger Bob’s, family owned on Main since December 1982, runs $12 to $19 for the burger. MAP Brewing is $16.50 to $18.75, and Montana Ale Works is $17 to $24.
So the ladder runs $8 to $24, and the bottom half of it is thinly occupied. That is the band mobile operators compete in, and it is why a truck with fast recovery on the griddle and two fryers can make the numbers work at a price a sit down restaurant on Main Street cannot.
Sourcing is an open lane too. Montana Ale Works is the only one naming a supplier, citing local pasture raised wagyu and angus chuck from Montana Wagyu Cattle Co. Backcountry makes the broadest claim, listing Montana raised and processed beef and bison with local hand cut potatoes and Montana flour in the buns. Burger Bob’s is item level, describing the Original Bob as fresh Montana chuck. The interesting one is Ted’s Montana Grill, which has the most Montana sounding name in town and makes the least Montana specific sourcing claim of the group. If you are building a burger concept for this market, naming your ranch is a differentiator that is still available.
Cooking at 4,800 feet, and what altitude does not change
Half the altitude advice on the internet is about boiling water, which is close to irrelevant on a burger truck. Water boils around 202.8 degrees at Bozeman’s elevation, about nine degrees below sea level, and USDA FSIS puts the rule of thumb at just under one degree per 500 feet of elevation. That matters for a pot of chilli holding a simmer. It does not matter to a patty.
Griddling is essentially unaffected. The plate sits at 350 to 400 degrees regardless of barometric pressure, so searing and browning behave the same way they do at sea level, and the FDA Food Code target for ground beef is 155 degrees for 17 seconds, well under boiling either way. There is no altitude driven food safety problem on the burger itself.
Frying does need adjusting. FSIS is explicit that you lower the frying temperature about 3 degrees for every 1,000 feet of elevation, which is roughly 14 degrees at Bozeman. A 350 degree sea level program becomes about 336. That change is small on paper and compounds in practice, because the same altitude is derating the burner heating the oil.
Which brings it back to gas input. NFPA 54 requires appliance input ratings to be reduced above 2,000 feet, at 4 percent per 1,000 feet, as permitted by the authority having jurisdiction, or per the manufacturer’s installation instructions. Depending on which reading of that clause you apply, a burger truck’s gas line loses somewhere between 11 and 19 percent of its nameplate input at 4,811 feet. Gas piping has to be resized for altitude too under IFGC 402.2. The practical instruction is simple and it is printed right on the manufacturers’ own ordering blocks. Vulcan’s spec sheets say to specify altitude when above 2,000 feet, and Frymaster tabulates orifice substitutions from 2,000 to 10,000 feet. Order the appliances with the altitude specified. Do not convert orifices in a parking lot in Bozeman after the fact.
Ranked honestly by what bites a burger truck at this elevation: gas input derate first, because it slows griddle and fryer recovery, which is your throughput. Fryer setpoint second. Buns and anything simmered third. Generator headroom fourth. Boiling water barely registers.
Full equipment list
- Stainless steel cooking wall
- Stainless steel throughout the rest of the interior
- Aluminium diamond plate floor
- LED lighting throughout the interior and on the exterior
- 24 inch LP range, griddle top with oven below
- Two burner stove
- Two 40 pound fryers
- Three pan electric steam table
- 36 inch chef base
- 27 inch refrigerated prep table
- Full size standup refrigerator
- Freezer
- Hood vent
- Fire suppression system with Class K and ABC extinguishers
- 5ft service window with awning door, self closing doors and bug screen
- Hand wash sink
- Three compartment sink
- 8 gallon water heater
- 30 gallon fresh water tank, undermount, easy fill
- 40 gallon grey water tank, undermount
- 12kW generator
If you are still working out what belongs on your own line, our guide to what equipment goes in a food truck is a good starting point, and the burger food truck and trailer page covers how we spec burger builds generally.
Walk-in tour
More recent builds
- 14ft bagel food trailer for Yard Sale Bagels, also in Bozeman, with a conveyor oven line and a diesel heater for winter service
- 16ft fried chicken food truck for Sapphire Chicken, Corvallis and Missoula, two 40 pound fryers and a dedicated breading station
- 12ft funnel cake and ice cream trailer in Billings
- Everything we build for Bozeman and Gallatin County
Frequently asked questions
How much does a 16ft custom burger food truck cost?
Our food truck builds start at $55,000 and a fully equipped 16ft truck like this one typically lands around $72,000, depending on the cooking line, how much refrigeration you carry and the generator. A burger build sits at the higher end of a 16ft budget because two fryers, a chef base and hood suppression all cost real money. Build time is around six weeks.
What does it cost to get a food truck licensed in Bozeman, Montana?
Budget roughly $1,003 to open citywide: $150 for a small state mobile food licence, $252 for Gallatin County application review, $126 for the county pre-operational inspection, $250 for the Bozeman Mobile Vending Business License and $225 for the Bozeman Fire inspection. Add another $250 if you want the Downtown Mobile Vending License. The county figures come from a 2018 fee schedule, so confirm current amounts on 406-582-3120 before budgeting.
What size water tanks does Gallatin County require on a food truck?
Gallatin City-County Health’s plan review packet requires a 40 gallon fresh water tank, with the waste tank 15 percent larger, which puts the grey minimum at 46 gallons for a unit to count as self sufficient. Montana state guidance lands in the same place for any unit doing food prep with handwashing and sanitising. Decide this before plan review, because it is a cheap change on the drawing and an expensive one after the box is closed.
Does a food truck generator have to meet a noise limit in Bozeman?
Yes. The City of Bozeman limits generators to a maximum 60 dBA rating, and the mobile vending licence application requires you to declare the generator’s make, model and decibel rating. Bozeman Fire also requires generators and fuel cans to be kept at least 12 feet from the unit. On top of that, the Bozeman Farmers’ Market allows only whisper quiet generators and only on approval, with no electricity available on site.
Does altitude change how a burger truck cooks in Bozeman?
Griddling is essentially unaffected, because the plate temperature and the 155 degree ground beef target do not depend on barometric pressure. What changes is gas input. NFPA 54 derates appliance input above 2,000 feet, so at Bozeman’s 4,811 feet a gas line loses roughly 11 to 19 percent of nameplate depending on how the clause is read. Frying setpoints come down about 14 degrees per USDA FSIS. The practical effect is slower recovery between patty drops and basket drops, so order every gas appliance with the altitude specified.
Can a food truck operate on Main Street in downtown Bozeman?
Not during the hours you would want it. Main Street between Church and Grand Avenue is closed to mobile vendors from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., and Main, Mendenhall, Babcock, South Willson and North 7th are all excluded from the streets where vending is otherwise permitted. In practice Bozeman trucks work private lots, the North 7th and West Babcock courts, brewery rotations, and permitted events like Music on Main.
Ready to build yours?
We build custom food trucks and trailers out of Woodland Park, Colorado and deliver across Montana, including Bozeman, Billings, Missoula, Great Falls, Helena and Kalispell. If you are working on a burger concept, bring us the menu and the events you want to work and we will spec the line around them, including the tank sizes and generator rating Gallatin County and the City of Bozeman are going to ask about. Get in touch or call 719-722-2537.
Jacob Varghese
Zion Foodtrucks
719-722-2537