Club Venetian

This aspect of catering provides food for business meetings and corporate events. There are many competitors working in this form of catering owing to its high demand.

Advantages:

– This form of catering is profitable throughout the year, and does not depend on other factors like holiday seasons.

– It provides an opportunity to be recognized so that as future events come up, corporate clients will be willing to hire you again.

Disadvantages:

– Business meetings are often inclusive and designed to cater for everyone. The caterer is hence restricted to serving foods that are generally accepted.

There is a lot of competition in this market, with caterers competing amongst themselves and with restaurants that offer deliveries for business lunches and meetings.

As you plan to host an event to commemorate a special circumstance, it is important that you carefully consider the organization and management of your budget to ensure the success of your event. Regardless of financial limitations, you should be able to fully utilize your budget by employing the following tips:

In scheduling a day to hold your event, choose a weekday instead of a weekend. Most rental locations and halls are more expensive over the weekend.

In the same way, the time of day that your event will be scheduled for has implications on the budget. Schedule your event for the ‘non-peak’ hours of the banquet hall, where the peak hours represent times when the most guests visit the hall. If you are planning for an event in advance, you are in a better position to bargain on the cost of renting a location.

Once you have a location, use creative ways to deck the hall. Pick cheaper flowers that will still work to beautify the hall, distributing them well across the room to create the mood that you have in mind.

Offer the best menu that you can to your guests from an affordable caterer. If there is a place that you enjoy eating, ask if they offer catering. Use ingredients that are available locally, and avoid foods that you would have to import. Serve a respectable 5-course banquet without fussing over too many different types of food, and ensure that the food you serve will appease the tastes and appetites of your invitees.

There are different types of special events, from wedding reception to birthday parties, and most of these occasions demand the service of food. While some caterers focus on one type of event, many are comfortable catering at any one.

Advantages:

• These events offer the chance to employ innovative ideas for decoration and planning, besides the opportunity to apply your chef’s skills.
• They often offer a good opportunity to make a name for yourself through word of mouth. Guests that attend a well catered special event will be interested in hiring you as they plan their own occasions.

Disadvantages:

• Catering for special events can be too taxing for somebody that is not passionate about it. While you may be a talented chef, if the event-organizing aspect of this work is not something that you enjoy, it can end up being stressful.

Special events are just that- special. A small blunder can upset your client on a personal level.

This is catering that moves about in a vehicle that is intended to carry food. This includes parking lot vendors, and vendors that operate at festivals and fairs.

Advantages:

– Mobile catering is by nature a part-time venture with low start-up costs

– Mobile catering can be done while running another business or standard restaurant

Disadvantages:

– All the equipment needed for the entire catering operation is required to fit inside a cramped vehicle

– While moving about as a mobile caterer, it is difficult to establish a recognized brand or to gain a reliable customer base

This includes providing food for a variety of institutions, including schools, prisons and hospitals.

Advantages:

– Most industrial caterers are awarded contracts to provide an institution with catering services for a stipulated amount of time. This provides a sense of stability with assured payment

– Most institutions already have provisions in place for serving food e.g. cafeterias

Disadvantages:

– It is a great challenge to begin as an industrial caterer, and this is a position into which most caterers have grown, or otherwise been connected to by existing industrial caterers.

– While catering to a mass number of people, it is difficult to uphold high food qualities as an industrial caterer.

Different types of catering have different pros and cons, and you can operate by working on more than one aspect of catering. It is important however to select one type of catering to venture into as a beginner, allowing you to start up with a specific target market and focus. From this starting point, you can spread into various forms of catering as our business grows.