Share Your Food Truck Schedule From Apple Calendar (iPhone or Mac)

If you keep your food truck schedule in the Calendar app on your iPhone, you already have everything you need to run a live "find us" map. Apple lets you publish any iCloud calendar as a public link, and that link is a standard calendar feed. Paste it into BuildMyMap and every stop you add on your phone becomes a pin on a map on your own website. No export, no spreadsheet, no second app to update.

This guide walks through the exact taps on iPhone and the exact clicks on Mac, then covers the three things that trip people up: which calendar to publish, what goes in the Location field, and how long Apple takes to push a change out. We run a battery-powered coffee trailer in Wilmington, North Carolina, and one of our clients runs an entire Saturday brunch schedule this way, so this is written from use, not from a help page.

Why Apple Calendar works for a food truck schedule

Behind the scenes, an iCloud public calendar is an iCal feed, the same format Google and Outlook use. Anything that can read an iCal feed can read your Apple calendar, and BuildMyMap reads iCal feeds. So the calendar you already use to plan your week can double as the schedule your customers see, with no retyping.

The important thing to understand is that Apple publishes a whole calendar, not individual events. There is no way to make only some events public. That shapes the first step.

Step 1: Make a dedicated calendar for stops

Before you turn anything public, create a calendar that holds only your public stops. Call it something like "Truck Schedule" or your business name. Keep dentist appointments, supplier calls, and private catering jobs on a different calendar.

Two reasons. First, the Public Calendar switch exposes everything on that calendar, titles and locations included, to anyone with the link. Second, the map treats every event with an address as a stop, so a private catering job with a client's home address would show up as a place for the public to visit. A dedicated calendar solves both.

On iPhone: open Calendar, tap Calendars at the bottom, tap Add Calendar, name it, and make sure it is under your iCloud account, not "On My iPhone." Only iCloud calendars can be published.

Step 2: Turn on Public Calendar and copy the link (iPhone)

1. Open the Calendar app.
2. Tap Calendars at the bottom of the screen.
3. Find your stops calendar and tap the "i" button next to it.
4. Turn on Public Calendar.
5. Tap Share Link.
6. Choose Copy.

That is all. You now have a link on your clipboard that looks something like this:

webcal://p12-caldav.icloud.com/published/2/...

The numbers will differ, but it will always start with webcal:// and contain icloud.com/published. That is the link BuildMyMap wants.

Step 2, Mac version

If you plan on a Mac instead:

1. Open Calendar.
2. In the sidebar, right-click (or Control-click) the stops calendar.
3. Choose Share Calendar.
4. Check Public Calendar.
5. Copy the link that appears.

It is the same webcal link, and it works identically. Publishing once on either device covers both, since the calendar lives in iCloud.

Step 3: Paste the link into BuildMyMap

Paste the webcal link into BuildMyMap exactly as copied. You do not need to change webcal to https or clean anything up. BuildMyMap swaps the prefix itself, fetches the feed to confirm it can actually read it, and only saves the connection once the fetch succeeds. If the link does not validate, the most common cause is that Public Calendar is still off, or you copied a sharing invitation for a specific person instead of the public link.

If you prefer, send the link to us during setup and we connect it for you. Setup is done for you either way, which is what the setup fee pays for.

Step 4: Put the street address in the Location field

This is the rule that matters most. The map places a pin from the Location field of each event, and only from that field. A full street address, like "123 Market St, Wilmington, NC 28401," places the pin exactly. A venue name alone can work when Apple's suggestions fill in the address behind the scenes, but "the brewery" or "usual spot" places nothing. When in doubt, type the address.

What the map does with each part of an event:

Event field	What the map does with it
Location	Turned into the pin. Required for the stop to appear at all.
Start and end time	Shown as your hours at that stop, and used to decide what counts as today and upcoming.
Repeat	Expanded into every future occurrence, so a weekly stop shows every week.
Title	Your label for the stop. Keep it short, like the venue name.

Events in the past drop off on their own. You never have to delete old stops.

Repeating stops, skipped weeks, and one-off changes

Most trucks run on patterns: the same brewery every Friday, a market every other Saturday. Apple Calendar handles all of it, and the map follows.

Weekly and every other week. Set Repeat to Weekly, or Custom with "every 2 weeks," and the map shows every upcoming occurrence.

Skipping one date. Open the occurrence you need to skip, delete it, and choose "Delete This Event Only." That date disappears from the map and the rest of the series stays.

Changing one date. Open the occurrence, change the time or location, and choose "Save for This Event Only." Only that one stop moves.

Ending a series. Set an end date on the repeat, or delete "All Future Events" from the last date you want to keep.

Edited single occurrences and exceptions are part of the iCal standard, and BuildMyMap reads them. A Saturday that moved to a different farmers market shows up at the new market, not both.

How long until a change shows on the map

Here is the honest part. Apple regenerates public calendar feeds on its own schedule, not the moment you tap Save. In our experience a change can take an hour or more to appear in the published feed, and BuildMyMap can only show what Apple has published. Google Calendar, by comparison, updates its public feed within minutes, so a Google-based map reflects a change almost immediately.

For most trucks this does not matter, because the schedule is planned days ahead. Where it bites is the same-hour change: you decide at 10 AM to skip the noon stop because of rain. The map may still show the stop for a while. Our advice for Apple users: plan stops at least a day out whenever you can, and treat a true last-minute change as a social post job (a story, a text to regulars) in addition to the calendar edit. If instant updates are a hard requirement, run the stops calendar in Google instead. Our Google Calendar guide covers that setup.

A real truck doing this today

Electric Biscuits in Wilmington, NC, runs a Saturday grab-and-go biscuit brunch, and the whole schedule lives in Apple Calendar on an iPhone. The owner adds Saturdays with the address in the Location field, the public link is connected to BuildMyMap, and the map on the site reads it directly. No one at BuildMyMap touches the schedule week to week. That is the whole point: the tool should disappear into the habit you already have.

Troubleshooting

The link will not validate. Check that Public Calendar is on for that specific calendar, and that the link contains icloud.com/published. A link that came from inviting a specific person is a private share, not a public feed.

A stop is missing. Almost always a blank Location field. Open the event, add the address, save. If the event is on a different calendar than the one you published, it will never show.

The pin is in the wrong place. The Location text is ambiguous. Replace a venue nickname with the full street address and the pin snaps to the right spot.

I changed something and the map has not caught up. Give it an hour. If it is still wrong the next morning, check that you saved the change to the published calendar and not a personal one.

What it costs

BuildMyMap is $200 one-time setup then $24 per month at the regular rate. The first 15 founding clients pay $150 setup, with the first month included, then $19 per month, locked in. Extra trucks are $5 per month each. Cancel anytime. See pricing, look at real client maps, or click around the demo. If you run a coffee truck specifically, we wrote a page for you, and the paste-in steps for putting the map on your site are in how to add a live map to your website.