Sports Day And School Summer Event Catering

Three problems at once

A school summer event has a specific combination of difficulties, and they are not the ones a caterer usually deals with.

You do not know the numbers. The children are countable. The parents are not, and attendance depends entirely on the forecast.

It is outdoors, on grass, usually with no power at the serving end and nowhere to put anything down.

It is run by volunteers, most of whom have jobs and are doing this in a free period or on annual leave.

Anything that requires cooking, plating or watching is the wrong answer, however good it looks on paper.

For the children

Kids club lunches at £5.25 a head are built for exactly this: individually portioned, nothing needing cutlery, nothing needing heating. For a sports day where children eat between events rather than sitting down, individual portions are worth a great deal more than a shared platter.

The kids party buffet at £8.00 a head is the fuller option where the event has a proper break in it and children are actually sitting to eat.

Both are prepared and labelled for allergens. Give us the numbers for each requirement when you order, and the school’s list rather than a guess. This is the one setting where getting an allergen wrong is genuinely serious.

For the adults

Parents and staff are the unpredictable half. A cold buffet is the flexible answer because it does not spoil if fewer come and it stretches if more do.

• Buffet 1 at £5.50 a head, sandwiches, eight fillings.
• Buffet 5 at £7.70 with savouries, if it is a longer afternoon.

Add hand cooked crisps at £2.75, a fresh fruit platter at £13.80 and cans of pop at £1.35, on a hot afternoon on a field, the drinks go faster than the food.

Ordering for a number you do not know

Two things help.

Order the children exactly and the adults conservatively. The child count is known and fixed. Under-ordering on adults is easily survivable at an event where nobody paid for a meal; over-ordering by forty is money on the grass.

Split the delivery point from the serving point. We deliver to a door, not to the middle of a field. Tell us where the van should come and have somebody ready to carry, on a school site in the middle of an event that is a longer walk than it looks.

Weather

If it is cancelled or moved indoors, tell us as early as you can. A cold buffet is completely indifferent to which of those happens, which is the strongest argument for one at a British outdoor school event. The food does not care whether it ends up on a field or in a hall.

Practicalities

Nothing we deliver needs heating, plating or a kitchen. It arrives on covered platters ready to put straight out, with disposable plates and napkins included, and our driver collects the platters and cool boxes the next working day so nothing is left for the site team on Monday morning.

Delivery is free, there is a £20 minimum on the order value, and we need the order by 4pm the day before. Summer term dates are busy across every school in the patch at once, so get the date in the book earlier than the lead time strictly requires: 1 April is a sensible point to have it settled.