Corporate Event Catering: The Five Occasions and What Each One Needs

Five occasions, one sandwich platter

Most offices have one catering habit and apply it to everything. A platter arrives, it is fine, nobody thinks about it. That is genuinely the right answer for the majority of days, but it is applied to five quite different situations, and in two of them it costs you something.

Here is what each occasion actually needs.

1. The board lunch

Small, high stakes, tight timing. Six to twelve people, an agenda, and forty-five minutes.

What matters is that it does not interrupt. Food that needs plating, serving or explaining eats into the meeting. Buffet 5 at £7.70 a head, sandwiches and savouries, laid out before people arrive is right, or grazing boards at £97.00 a crate if the room should look considered.

What to avoid: anything hot. It arrives at a fixed time and meetings do not.

2. The client visit

The one where the food is noticed. Somebody has travelled, and what you put in front of them is read as a signal.

This is where the extra two pounds a head is worth spending. Buffet 9 at £11.00 covers a full day. Canapés at £9.80 a head for three work for an afternoon reception. A grazing board on the table before anybody sits down does more than a platter of sandwiches ever will, and costs about the same as buffet-plus-extras.

What to avoid: individually wrapped anything. It reads as vending machine.

3. The training day

Long, and the food has to do two shifts. People arrive at nine having skipped breakfast and flag at three.

Order breakfast from £3.35 a head, pastries delivered between 8am and 9am, and a buffet at lunch. That is genuinely cheaper than one large lunch, because a room that has eaten at nine needs less at one. For a full day, Buffet 9 at £11.00 carries the afternoon on its fruit and cake.

What to avoid: one enormous lunch and nothing else. Everybody eats too much and the afternoon session suffers for it.

4. The all-hands

Volume, and everybody eats at once. Fifty to two hundred, one room, twenty minutes.

Above fifty, hot food becomes possible: the hot buffet is £23.50 a head with a fifty-person minimum, three mains and three sides across four menus. If it is summer and there is outside space, a hog roast from £795 turns a company meeting into something people remember.

What to avoid: underestimating the queue. One serving point for a hundred and fifty people is twenty minutes of standing.

5. The leaving do

Late, informal, and drink is involved. Which changes the food entirely.

This is a finger buffet job. Everything eaten standing with one hand. Buffet 5 at £7.70 or Buffet 9 at £11.00, put out around an hour after the start rather than at the start. Food that goes out too early at a leaving do is food nobody eats.

The thing that saves the most money

Not the menu. A credit account.

Without one, every order is a card payment, a receipt, an expense claim and a line on somebody’s statement to explain. With one, you order all month and get a single invoice, and anyone in the office can order without needing the company card, which removes the commonest reason a buffet gets booked late.

For anything recurring, a standing weekly order goes further: same buffet, same day, same slot, set up once.

What we will ask you

The date, the time you need it there, how many, the building and floor, and a name for reception if the building needs one. Dietary requirements with numbers rather than proportions. Every buffet is 30% vegetarian before you ask.

Ordering for an office? Corporate catering has the prices and the account details, or office catering if it is a one-off occasion rather than a routine.