Questions to Place before Hiring Catering Services

by Hannah M. Party Foods Sydney

Availing catering services becomes a necessity if you are thinking about organising an event. This becomes even more vital when you are organising a BBQ event as this is something that can’t be handled through DIY. In that case, it would become extremely important that you hire a reliable service provider and you can do this easily with the help of the tips discussed in this post. These tips are basically the questions that you can put before the shortlisted service providers to dig deeper and deeper about their competency and calibre.

How many guests will be at your event?

This question is something that you need to put before yourself before shooting questions towards the shortlisted service providers.
A lot of how they will perform would depend entirely on the number of guests attending your event and whether the caterer has this information or not.

For how long they have you been in the BBQ catering business?

According to the experts of catering services, not all events are exactly the same and therefore, you need to place two questions before them.
The first question is for how long they have been offering their catering services in your region.
The second question is what expertise and experience they hold in arranging catering for your kind of event, i.e. BBQ in your case.
Certainly, this would not be an exact indicator of their capabilities, but with the answers, you can certainly get an idea of what to expect from them.
At the same time, don’t skimp away from asking for references and telephone numbers of the clients that they have served in the past.

What is the maximum number of guests you have catered before?

The next question should be regarding the maximum number of guests that they have served in the past.
Yet again, this would not give you any estimate of their experience or capabilities, but yes, it would definitely give you some indications of what to expect from them.
The answer of this question would also help you determine whether a particular company is capable of serving at your event, as per your expectations or not.
However, be aware that some caterers may answer with false extremely high figures. If you are suspicious about this, you can immediately ask them about how they were able to cater for such large audience. In case, they have no straight answers to your questions or if they fail to convince you, you can immediately filter that service provider out.

Ask for samples or presentation photos of past work

The next point that you need to remember is asking for their samples and photographs of the works that they have carried out in the past.
This act will simply help you deduce the quality of service to expect when you hire the caterer.

Similarly, other questions that you need to put before the shortlisted catering services providers are -

How many waiting servers are provided per guest?
Ensure any caterer you hire can provide the adequate number of waiting servers per guest.
Ask about overtime charges
What are the payment terms and conditions?
What happens if you have more guests than expected?