The top 10 catering tips for beginners in this article provide a blueprint for success. Reviewing the catering advice here is great whether you’re an experienced business or just starting out.
Good caterers need to be highly organized and knowledgeable about preparing large quantities of food.
The easy-to-follow advice in this article ensures your food options are competitive, the atmosphere is welcoming, and the customer reviews are positive.
Whether you’re running a small catering company for weddings or a large business that facilitates all event types – getting back to these basics allows you to prioritize improving the foundational pillars of success for any catering business.
1. Prepare in Advance
Completing as much preparation beforehand allows you to avoid delays and disruption if there are many orders. It’s especially important to prepare in advance if you have a complicated menu, a shortage of staff, or an unpredictable number of customers.
Here are a few ideas for how you can prepare in advance:
- Clean kitchen and cutlery: during downtime, it’s important to give your kitchen a fresh start by cleaning everything thoroughly. This includes cutlery, work surfaces, floors, and fridges.
- Minor preparation: complete all minor preparation tasks in advance if possible. For example, you can peel potatoes, cut up fruit, marinate meat, and chop onions. Anything that can be completed ahead of time without affecting food quality is a good idea.
- Prepare cold dishes: you can simplify the catering process by separating meals into hot and cold – the latter can be prepared ahead of time. For example, potato salads and Caesar salad dressing can be refrigerated and served later on in the day.
- Fridge space: ensuring you have enough space in the fridge is essential to maintain organization during the event. Therefore, throw away or place items in storage that are irrelevant to the upcoming event.
2. Organize your Menu and Environment
Organization is key to ensuring you control how the catering business runs. For example, if ingredients are clearly laid out and labeled, you can determine inventory levels at a glance. Hence, you can quickly decide about ordering more ingredients to avoid running out of stock unexpectedly.
The menu must also be organized with intent. For instance, highly profitable meals should go in the top right-hand corner of the menu, since that’s where most people look first. Also, you can showcase meals of the day and signature dishes in easy-to-find places on the menu, instead of burying them with other meals.
To ensure customers spend more money, the environment must be comfortable and invite people to stay for longer. Therefore, investing in good interior decor, pleasant music, candles, and warm colours is beneficial.
3. Prioritize Food Hygiene
The food hygiene rules for private parties are more relaxed, but in commercial settings, you must abide by the strict laws. There are specific requirements for how your employees must handle, store, source, and display foods.
Here are a few tips for ensuring food hygiene is maintained:
- Clean regularly: don’t leave all your cleaning chores for the end of the day or week. Instead, instruct your employees to clean as they go – especially if there are quiet periods of service.
- Fridge hygiene: all refrigerated ingredients must be labeled to avoid placing raw and cooked ones next to one another. Also, place raw meat on the bottom sections, and the temperature should be 1-4 degrees °C.
- Clips nails and tie hair back: all employees working in the kitchen must clip their nails, and long hair needs to be tied back. Additionally, wounds should be covered up, and jewelry must be removed. You’ll be shocked how often chefs lose jewelry during food preparation.
- Allergen information: foods with potential allergens such as nuts, raw dairy products, and rare meats, should be shared with customers.
- Avoid cross-contamination: you must not contaminate different ingredients since it can lead to confusing flavors and anger the customer. Hence, consider using color-coded chopping boards and logically separating workstations for each ingredient type.
4. Listen to Your Guests
You might have heard of the phrase, “the customer is always right”. In the catering industry this notion is important since customers will not want to eat food that doesn’t match their palette. Therefore, you need to listen to what customers are sharing about your menu and specific meals. For example, if tomato soup is not generating any sales, consider dropping the dish and adding pumpkin soup instead to see if you’ll get better results.
You’ll need an organized method of recording and processing customer comments. Firstly, waiters could ask customers at the end of each meal, but some customers may be too shy to leave honest opinions. Therefore, offer anonymous feedback cards that can be placed into a box when leaving the restaurant or catering event.
Finally, utilize the power of social media to allow customers to engage with your brand. You can view review comments, and there will be many suggestions you can consider to improve your menu for future orders.
5. Create a Practical Menu
Less is more when it comes to menu design – especially if you’re a new catering business that’s learning the ropes. Sourcing ingredients for a large menu can be complicated logistically and difficult to prepare for chefs. It’s far better to provide fewer options at high-quality levels than offer many choices with low standards.
Smaller menus are also more profitable since they take less time to cook, and people spend less time choosing. Furthermore, the streamlined dining experience results in faster table turnover, so you can capitalize on more customers during peak times.
Also, consider menu options where ingredients are shared to simplify sourcing, preparation, and cooking. Skilled chefs can use similar ingredients with drastically different outcomes. And finally, organize your menu so it’s easy to scan and everything is self-explanatory.
6. Be Polite and Friendly
Food quality, interior decor, and price are all important factors – but they will count for nothing if your employees don’t provide a welcoming atmosphere through a friendly vibe. Therefore, the entire team needs to receive training in customer service.
Think of how you’d like to be greeted when entering someone’s home. A positive attitude, smiles, and good manners will put you at ease, so employees should aim to offer the same kind of service.
However, it doesn’t mean that catering employees should deal with abusive customers. It works both ways, if customers are rude and cause disruption to the venue’s atmosphere, it’s appropriate to ask them to leave.
7. Choose your Service Style
The service style will determine the type of customers you target and the logistical approach you’ll need to take. There are 3 main catering service styles, which include:
- Plated: these catering events are typically sit-down occasions such as wedding dinners and charity fundraisers. The price per person for this event type is typically higher, and individual guests usually choose menu items ahead of time. Therefore, you can arrange the correct amount of ingredients and prepare the meals on time.
- Tray pass: this is a budget-friendly option that includes the servers carrying food displays, and individuals from the group can take what they like. Ideally, you’ll limit the number of ingredients for this event type, and it’s aimed at occasions where guests will be standing.
- Buffet: this popular option includes multiple self-serve stations and cutlery. Customers would pick up a plate and visit each food station to take as much as they like. Therefore, fewer employees are required to serve a large number of people, and it’s a cheaper option for customers.
8. Pick a Theme
Customers loved themed menus because it adds a sense of immersion to the dining experience. For example, if you pick an Italian theme, customers can experience a foreign cuisine they might not cook at home. Also, popular themes allow customers to readily identify the type of foods that will be served.
Ideally, there should be a choice of themes that clients can choose from to match their tastes. Options that customers regularly look for include Chinese, Italian, Indian, Greek, French, and Japanese.
However, there should be some flexibility for customers to somewhat deviate from a theme if they want to add a custom dish. After all, the catering service is there to satisfy the customer, so accept requests that can be easily met with a simple menu addition.
9. Use your Signature Dish
Adding a signature dish to the menu that clients won’t find elsewhere provides a unique selling point. It’s a marketing tool that allows you to push profitable ingredients and make it easy for customers to identify dishes they should try at your catering company.
Here are a few ideas for creating a signature dish:
- Memorable name: giving your signature dish a memorable name promotes word of mouth. That’s because customers can recommend the dish to their social circles, and if the dish contains your brand name you’ll get more recognition. A catchy name ensures visitors remember your dish and will return for more.
- Cost-effective ingredients: you’re likely to sell the signature dish in higher volumes than other meals – especially if it’s tasty. Therefore, you should source profitable ingredients that you can buy in bulk.
- Create a story: when servers present the signature dish, it helps if there is a story behind the creation. Maybe the chef’s mother used to make it during their childhood, or the dish draws from the top ingredients of the region. Customers typically want a unique experience when visiting a restaurant, something they would never cook at home. Hence, adding a story to the dish makes it stand out from any other meal.
- More than one: you can have multiple signature dishes across different categories to cater to all tastes. For example, you could have a signature soup, fish, meat, and dessert dish. Therefore, most customers will have a chance to choose a signature dish that matches their tastes.
- Exotic ingredients: adding hard-to-get or expensive ingredients to the signature dish will increase orders. That’s because customers want to try out new foods, and exotic ingredients will do the trick.
10. Plate Food Beautifully
Presentation is key and there are many strategies you can use to plate food beautifully. This section for this catering tip summarizes a few ideas your staff can experiment with to get customers excited about eating your food.
- Create height: building the food up from the bottom to the top means it will not get separated. This allows the food to stay warmer and adds an elegant minimalist look when presented to customers.
- Horizontal meat cuts: ensuring your meat is cut horizontally means that the quality can be displayed for the customer to easily see. Also, slicing against the grain of the meat results in a tender cut.
- Vary textures: playing around with multiple textures allows for contrast. For instance, adding sauces and foam can add colour to a dish.
- Theme matched: ensuring there is consistency between the restaurant’s/venu’s theme and the dish will go down well with customers. It shows that a lot of thought has gone into meal preparation.
- Select the correct plates: you can create varied and unique plates when presenting food. Mix it up and see what customers enjoy.
What is the Key to Success in Catering?
Now let’s take a closer look at the biggest keys to success in catering. Beginners should cover these aspects to ensure all the bases are covered.
- Education for success: as a newcomer to the catering industry, you should always continue learning to improve the quality of your food and customer service.
- Serve quality food: never compromise on the quality of your food. Customers will not come back if the food fails to meet expectations.
- Stand out from the competition: there might be a large list of competitors in your local area. Therefore, offer something unique to attract new customers, including exotic ingredients and themes.
- Top-notch customer service: train your employees to provide the best customer service to your clients. Make them feel welcome and relaxed, which is a prerequisite for having a great meal.
- Marketing and networking: a big part of your catering business’s success depends on marketing and networking. You’ll need to find high-ROI advertising channels and network with complementary businesses that can give you good rates for things like ingredients and cutlery.
- Operations and processes: perfect your operations and processes to obtain maximum efficiency and minimize wastage. A well organized and efficient company is noticeably better. The client can see that and you will have better satisfaction, more referrals and overall smoother events. Keep optimizing your operations and creating better processes for all scenarios.
How Can Flex Help New Caterers?
We hope the catering tips for beginners above provided you with some ideas on how you can improve your business. These tips are applicable to any catering business worldwide and will improve your odds of success in a highly contested industry.
However, these ideas are just the tip of the iceberg. We encourage you to experiment and think outside of the box to improve your catering business above the competition. For example, try out Flex Catering, an all-in-one catering software that will save time and increase revenue. Your improved organizational structure will be noticed by customers and help employees provide a better service.
