Cricket Teas And Sports Club Catering: Feeding Two Teams Every Weekend

The hardest recurring catering there is

Every constraint at once. The budget is fixed by the club and it is not generous. The numbers are twenty-two plus umpires plus whoever turns up, and you find out on the day. The kitchen is a hatch with an urn. And the eating window is twenty minutes, all at once, in the middle of a match nobody wants to delay.

Most clubs solve it with a rota and a volunteer who has been doing it since 1998. That works right up until it does not.

What a tea actually needs

Forget the tradition for a moment and look at the requirement. Twenty-five people, twenty minutes, no kitchen, eaten standing or on a bench, in whites.

• Sandwiches, cut small. The whole thing rests on these. Buffet 1 is £5.50 a head.
• Savouries. Sausage rolls, pork pies, quiche, food that survives being out for an hour and does not need a plate. Buffet 5 at £7.70 adds these.
• Something sweet. Cake with the tea, which at a cricket club is not optional. Homemade cakes are £2.25 a head as an extra.
• Nothing that needs cutlery. A fork is one thing too many when you are padded up.

At twenty-five people, Buffet 5 comes to around £190 before VAT for the whole tea. That is worth knowing if your club is currently arguing about whether catering is affordable.

The numbers problem, and how to handle it

You will not know the number until the day and we need it the day before. That is a real tension and there are two workable answers.

Order for a fixed number every week. Twenty-five covers two elevens, umpires and a scorer. If three extras turn up they eat slightly less; if six do, that is the week somebody goes to the shop. Predictable, budgetable, and it removes the weekly decision entirely.

Order the level up. Buffet 5 for twenty-two rather than Buffet 1 for twenty-eight. More food per head, same money, and it stretches further than extra portions of less.

What does not work is trying to guess precisely every Saturday. Nobody wins that.

A standing order is the real answer

For a club playing every other Saturday through a season, a standing order is transformative. Same buffet, same day, same delivery slot, set up once, and it arrives without anybody having to remember on a Friday night.

Add a credit account and the club gets one invoice a month rather than a volunteer paying by card and claiming it back, which is the part that actually causes friction in most clubs.

Beyond cricket

The same applies to any club with a fixture list. Rugby teas, presentation evenings, junior tournaments, end-of-season dinners.

For a presentation night or a tournament finals day, the numbers jump and the format changes: a hog roast from £795 for up to fifty guests feeds a clubhouse and a car park in a way a buffet cannot, and for a summer finals day it turns the fixture into an event.

Dietary requirements at a club

More common than clubs expect, particularly in junior sections. Every buffet is 30% vegetarian as standard and vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free and halal portions are prepared separately and labelled.

For a standing order we keep the requirements on the account, so the same allowances come every week without anybody restating them.

Running a club? Sandwich buffets has the full range and prices, and ring the office to set up a standing order or an account: 0115 647 6903.