Google Calendar to Live Map: Set Up Your Food Truck Schedule in 20 Minutes

If your food truck schedule already lives in Google Calendar, you are about twenty minutes from a live map on your website that updates itself. The steps: create a calendar just for stops, make it public, copy its public address, paste that into BuildMyMap, and put a street address in the Location field of every event. After that, adding a stop on your phone is the update. There is no second place to post.

We run our own coffee trailer this way in Wilmington, NC, and it is the setup most of our clients use. Here is every step, plus the parts that confuse people: recurring events, cancelling a single date, moving a stop, how fast the map catches up, and running more than one truck.

Before you start: make a dedicated calendar (3 minutes)

Do not publish your main calendar. When you make a Google calendar public, every event on it becomes visible to anyone with the link, and the map treats every event with an address as a stop. A personal calendar leaks your dentist appointment; a mixed business calendar turns a private catering job at someone's house into a public destination.

Create a new one:

1. Open calendar.google.com on a computer. Creating calendars is a desktop feature; you can add events from the phone app afterward.
2. In the left sidebar, next to "Other calendars," click the plus sign and choose Create new calendar.
3. Name it something obvious, like "Truck Schedule," and set the time zone to where you operate.
4. Click Create calendar.

Everything public goes here. Everything else stays where it was.

Step 1: Make the calendar public (2 minutes)

1. In the left sidebar, hover over the new calendar, click the three dots, and choose Settings and sharing.
2. Scroll to Access permissions for events.
3. Check Make available to public. Leave the dropdown on "See all event details," because the map needs the location.
4. Google will warn you that the calendar will be visible to everyone. That is the point, and it is why you made a dedicated calendar.

Step 2: Copy the public address (1 minute)

On the same settings page, scroll down to Integrate calendar. You will see several links. Two of them work with BuildMyMap:

• Public address in iCal format. This is the one we recommend. It ends in basic.ics.
• Public URL to this calendar, the embed link. BuildMyMap accepts this too and converts it to the feed address on its own.

Copy either one. Skip the Secret address: it works technically, but anyone who gets it can read the calendar, and resetting it later means reconnecting the map.

Step 3: Paste it into BuildMyMap (1 minute)

Paste the link into the calendar field in BuildMyMap. Before saving, BuildMyMap fetches the feed and confirms it can read it, so a calendar that is not actually public fails right there with a clear message instead of silently showing an empty map. If you would rather hand us the link during setup, that works too; setup is done for you.

Step 4: Add stops with a street address (the rest of your 20 minutes)

The map places pins from the Location field. That is the single most important habit to build. Open a new event, type the venue in Location and pick the suggestion Google offers, which fills in the full address, or type the full street address yourself. "Example Brewing, 123 Market St, Wilmington, NC 28401" places the pin exactly. "Example Brewing" alone might, "the brewery" never will.

Set a start and end time, because those become the hours shown for the stop. Title it with the venue name. Save it to the Truck Schedule calendar, not your default one; check the calendar selector on the event, since Google defaults to your primary calendar.

What you want	What you do in Google Calendar	What the map shows
Same brewery every Friday	One event, Repeat: Weekly on Friday	A Friday stop every week
Market every other Saturday	Custom repeat, every 2 weeks on Saturday	Alternating Saturdays
Skip one Friday	Open that occurrence, Delete, "This event"	That Friday disappears, the rest stay
Move one stop to a new address	Open that occurrence, edit Location, Save, "This event"	Only that date moves
Stop running a route	Edit the series, set an end date	Future dates drop off
Cancel today because of weather	Delete today's occurrence	Gone within minutes

Recurring stops

Most food truck weeks are patterns, and Google handles them well. Set the Repeat dropdown on the event to Daily, Weekly, or Custom. Custom lets you pick "every 2 weeks," specific weekdays, and an end date or occurrence count. BuildMyMap expands the series into real dates, so a weekly stop shows as individual upcoming stops in the list.

One habit that saves pain: do not create twelve separate Friday events by hand. Create one and repeat it. When the brewery changes your slot from 5 PM to 4 PM, you change the series once.

Cancelling one date

Open the occurrence you need to cancel. Click the trash icon. Google asks whether to delete this event, this and following events, or all events. Choose This event. The map drops that single date and keeps the pattern. This is also how you handle a holiday: delete the one occurrence on Thanksgiving and nothing else changes.

Moving a stop

Open the occurrence, change the Location (or the time), click Save, and choose This event. If the whole series is moving, choose This and following events so the past stays accurate and the future reflects the new spot.

How long until the map updates

Google publishes changes to a public calendar quickly, usually within a few minutes, and BuildMyMap caches each map briefly for speed. In practice a change you make on your phone is on your map within a few minutes. This is one real advantage of Google over Apple Calendar, where public feeds can lag by an hour or more; we cover that honestly in the Apple Calendar guide.

What this means operationally: a rain cancellation at 10 AM is off the map before anyone drives over at noon. You may still want to post a story for the people who checked earlier, but the map itself is not the weak link.

Running more than one truck

If you have two trucks, give each its own Google calendar and connect both. BuildMyMap shows each truck with its own name and pin color on one shared map, so a customer sees which truck is at which spot. Extra trucks are $5 per month each, and the add-on stops at five extra trucks; a sixth or tenth truck costs nothing more. Separate calendars also keep your drivers out of each other's schedules.

Sharing the calendar with staff

You may want a manager to add stops without your login. In Settings and sharing, under Share with specific people, add their Google account with "Make changes to events." They edit from their own phone, and the map follows. The public link does not change.

Putting the map where customers look

Once the map is live you get a short link and a one-line embed. Put the embed on your website (our guide to adding a live map to your site has the paste-in steps for WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix), the short link in your Instagram bio and Google Business Profile, and a QR code on the truck. Every one of those now points at a page that reads from the calendar you just set up. For the Google profile side, see Google Business Profile for mobile businesses.

What it costs

BuildMyMap is $200 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, browse real client maps, or click around the demo. If you run a food truck, there is a page written for you.