Polo Poutine · Food & Beverage

A menu people can order from the sidewalk

A poutine truck with a loyal lunch-rush following had no way to say where it would be tomorrow. We built a site built around the two questions everyone actually asks: what's on the menu, and where are you parked.

Role: Brand identity, UX, design, build
Year: 2025
Deliverables: Identity mark, responsive site, live location finder, online ordering, catering enquiry flow

The Polo Poutine homepage shown on a laptop and a phone, with a photograph of the truck's cook holding a bowl of poutine and a View Menu button. — The homepage leads with the person behind the window, not the truck. The mobile version was the one customers actually used, standing in line.

The problem

Polo Poutine started as a single truck and a following built on Instagram stories — today's stop, today's special, a photo of the line. It worked, until it didn't: a story disappears in 24 hours, and half the questions in the DMs were the same ones asked yesterday.

There was no website at all, just a link-in-bio page pointing at a PDF menu that hadn't been updated since a topping was discontinued. Customers would walk up, ask what was still available, and hold up the line finding out.

The bigger cost was catering. Corporate and wedding bookings — the highest-margin work — were arriving as Instagram DMs with no way to see package pricing, so half of them went quiet after the first reply.

The approach

Three moves, in order.

Give the truck a name of its own

A hand-drawn fries-in-a-box mark and a heavy, rounded display face replaced the generic Instagram-bio look, so the brand reads as a place people go, not a story that expires.

Put today's stop above everything else

The homepage answers the DM question first: an interactive map with the current day highlighted, so a customer knows in one glance whether the truck is anywhere near them today.

Turn catering into a form, not a DM thread

Package tiles with real starting prices and a structured enquiry form replaced the back-and-forth. A quote request now arrives with a date, guest count and package already attached.

The work

What we built.

The new homepage

The new Polo Poutine homepage on desktop and mobile: an oversized headline reading Street food, elevated, with a close-up of loaded poutine bleeding off the right edge. — The homepage, at full width. The dish carries the page, with one primary order action and a quieter View Menu beside it — and the headline keeps its weight on mobile rather than collapsing into body copy.

The menu page: a filter row for Classics, Loaded, Veggie and Sides, and a grid of poutine dishes each with a photo, name, description and price. — The menu, filterable by category, with a real photo of every dish. No more asking at the window what's actually available.

The Find the Truck page: a row of day-of-week pills, a stylised street map with pinned stops, and a list of today's locations with hours and directions links. — Find the Truck. The day pills and map are driven by the same schedule the owner updates from a phone between stops.

The catering enquiry page: a form with event date, guest count, location and event type fields, three selectable package tiles, and a summary card showing what's included and a starting price. — Catering, with real package pricing up front. The form captures everything needed to send a quote back same day, instead of a DM thread that goes quiet.

Also delivered

A half-day shoot at the truck, covering the food, the cook and three of the regular stops. A simple back-office page where the owner updates tomorrow's location from a phone in under a minute, which pushes to both the map and the day pills automatically.

The whole site loads in under a second on a phone on the sidewalk, and every button is sized for someone holding a tray in one hand.

Results

First quarter on the new site.

+140%

Catering enquiries via the form

2.1×

Menu page views per visit

−60%

“Where are you today” DMs

4.8★

Average review mentioning the site

“I used to spend my morning answering the same three questions on Instagram before I'd even opened the window. Now people just show up knowing what they want.”

Marco PoloniOwner, Polo Poutine

Figures are illustrative of the outcomes this engagement was designed to produce and are shown here for portfolio purposes.

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