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This paper aims to evaluate the profile of food truck consumers at gourmet events, identifying their food preferences and opinions about the provision of safe food by this segment.

A total of 750 food truck customers in the city of Curitiba, Brazil, participated in the study. The survey investigated the socio-economic profile of the consumers, the frequency of their food consumption, the criteria for their choice of food trucks, their mean spending value, the method of payment used and the opinion of consumers about food cost and food truck hygiene conditions.

Most consumers were female (62.7 per cent), students (31.3 per cent) and with an average age of 29 ± 10 years. Many customers preferred the consumption of salty foods (84.0 per cent), mainly burgers and kabobs. The consumers reported spending between $6.32 and $9.03 during the events, and men spent more money than women (p = 0.000). Both thought that good conditions of hygiene (81.9 per cent), food presentation (46.9 per cent) and service (48.0 per cent) were more important than the product price (19.3 per cent). Consumers thought that the food trucks had an adequate structure (73.5 per cent) and the food handlers (74.4 per cent) had good conditions of hygiene, ensuring the safety of the food sold.

On account of the convenience sampling in an urban environment, the data cannot be generalized to the entire population of the municipality and to other regions.

There are few studies with food trucks consumers in Brazil, to this writing the largest sample ever used for this type of research in this country. The results were designed to be used by professionals working in the area.

The purpose of this paper is to develop, validate the content and analyze the inter-rater reliability of a checklist of good hygiene practices in food trucks (GHPFT).

The study was carried out in Curitiba, Brazil, and divided into three stages: preparation of the evaluation checklist; validation of the checklist’s content; and reliability analysis. Content validation was carried out by six experts using the Content Validity Index (CVI). The reliability analysis was performed on five food trucks by four partners using the κ coefficient.

Prior to validation, the checklist contained 34 items divided into 9 categories; after, this number was changed to 30 items divided into 8 categories. The validated checklist presented a CVI=0.867 for each of the categories and κ between 0.636 and 0.759, indicating good reproducibility.

The checklist considered the requirements of Brazilian laws, and may not reflect the good hygiene practices requirements specific to other countries.

The checklist proposed is an unprecedented tool, and may be used in the implementation of good hygiene practices and in inspections carried out by the Health Regulatory Agency for the street food segment.

The study was the first to describe the development, content validation and inter-rater reliability analysis of an evaluation checklist for GHPFT, and the results can be used by professionals working in the area.