Catering Menu Planning

Carrots puree with parsley on wooden background. Shallow DOF

Catering is an enterprising business that requires some planning in order to make it truly successful. Creating a menu is one of the biggest challenges. You want a cost effective plan that is somewhat simple and appealing to a large number of people. So, what is the best way to come up with a catering menu?

Know your audience

What sort of clientele do you hope to attract with your food? Do you want to serve starters at black-tie occasions or are you happy grilling large chunks of seasoned meat for a truckers' convention? Or are you versatile enough to cater to any person's whims? Ask yourself these things when you sit down to start your business. Obviously formal events require recipes to satisfy more sophisticated palates while a child's party is as simple as macaroni cheese and frankfurters. It is up to you to decide your target market. Of course, you can always change your entire menu sometime in the future, and try a totally different approach.

When deciding on your target customers, ask yourself if you can handle criticism from certain types of people. If you break down when a local politician tells you that your potato salad is nasty, you might want to try serving a different class of people.

Know your talent

Your head chef probably graduated top of her class from a culinary institute in Nice, France, and knows how to cook everything from asparagus to ziti. Or her last position was probably a hash-slinger at some greasy spoon in Saint Clairsville, Ohio. Either way you need to consider how much talent and what sort of experience your staff bring to the table (in more than one sense) before you accept an order for stuffed quails in aspic. If you do not assess their strengths, you could find yourself in the kitchen cooking the little birds in gelatinous animal fat.

When you interview a cook or chef for a position, have her or him prepare a signature dish or something that best represents her or his abilities.

Know your budget and the client's budget

By now you have probably decided on your target audience and staff. Now it is time to start ordering food. No, you are not sending out for pizza. You are doing some major grocery shopping, and if you went over budget with that amazing food processor with the fuel-injected 3.8 V6 that you just HAD to have, choosing your ingredients is suddenly very complicated. Obviously clients with more sophisticated tastes demand more expensive meals. If you wasted your food budget on shiny new santoku knives, it is doubtful you can afford a crate of live Maine lobsters for the debutante event you just booked. Have a clear understanding of how much each ingredient costs and buy in bulk if you can store excess in a freezer or pantry. Keep in mind that your clients are on a budget as well.

When figuring prices, the general rule of thumb for profit is cost plus 50 percent. Of course, if you built a name for yourself, or your schedule is getting packed, you can always charge more.

Painting pretty pictures

Now that you know what sort of food you want to serve, start creating your actual menu. You most likely organize everything according to whether it is an appetizer, entree, dessert, and so on. You may decide to offer a description of each item and list every ingredient involved or simply write the dish followed by a price. You could even have tantalizing photographs of some of your signature recipes shown on each page. Just remember that the prettier the picture you paint or photograph, the more likely a customer chooses an item.

Visual aids get your clients salivating faster than verbal or written descriptions, so try inserting a few photographs, even small ones, into your menu.

Your menu speaks volumes about you and your business. The better it looks, the more clients you attract and the more business you get. You can keep the same menu for years or change it according to the seasons, your own preferences, or because you want something different.

The prettier the picture you paint, the more likely a customer chooses an item