Event Catering: Top Tips on Selecting Food Your Guests Will Love

Ah, food. Nothing brings a gathering, party, or corporate event together like bonding over the menu. Whether it’s bemoaning the utter state of the catering or celebrating the amazing food, the entrées you offer play a serious role in the attendees’ moods.

In fact, as many as 62 percent of people surveyed would attend an event for the food on its own. Needless to say, your menu should be one of your chief event catering concerns.

But how do you choose the best food for your event? Our guide will show you how to select catered food that will live on in the memories of your attendees for all the right reasons.

Don’t Forget to Account for Allergies and Preferences

One of the worst things you can do as the host for a catered event is neglect to consider common food allergies. Most event catering services offer menus that work around common allergies like shellfish and nuts. So, make sure that you get some common-food-allergen-free foods at your table.

Dietary preferences should also play a role in your event catering choices. It wouldn’t do to only offer carrot sticks and celery to a group that eats a vegan or vegetarian diet, would it?

Consider Your Venue

Another important factor to consider when selecting food for events is your venue. It’s all well and good to want a nice, open salad bar or chilled hors-d’oeuvres. Those options will seem less appealing to your guests when hours in the summer sun have wilted the lettuce and turned those hors-d’oeuvres lukewarm.

Equally unfortunate is placing massive orders for hot food without proper temperature controls in place. Those lukewarm Swedish meatballs won’t just taste unpleasant. They could also pose a serious health risk to your guests.

So, make sure that you consider the temperature, environment, and climate control options of your venue when deciding on food.

Organize a Taste Test With Event Catering Services

An event catering service might sound amazing when you read the options on their website. However, if you purchase from them taste untasted, you and your guests could be in for an unpleasant shock at the event itself.

Maybe the food is blander than you expected. Or worse, too spicy or poorly cooked for your guests to enjoy. To prevent this from happening to you, organize a taste test to ensure the quality of the food you’re ordering.

Seasonal Is Better for Your Budget

Hey, we get it. People love ice cream, no matter what the season is. Still, getting an ice cream truck rental might not make the most sense for your budget in wintertime.

To get the best event catering experience, you should opt for fresh, local, and seasonal dishes and flavors wherever possible. These dishes will be cheaper for the catering company to produce en masse, which then passes the savings along to you.

Cater to Your Demographic’s Tastes

Another important factor to consider when you choose your event food is the typical tastes of your targeted demographic. If you’re targeting corporate executives with millions or billions of dollars to their name, you don’t want to get taco and burger food trucks on-site.

By the same token, if your target demographic skews younger, opting for plated catering with lobster, steak, and other high-dollar foods won’t land well. They might enjoy the food, but the tone of the event will make them feel decidedly underdressed.

Give People the Power of Choice

Think about the last time you went to an event with disappointing catering. What was the largest issue with the food? For many, it’s that the event only offered the one tray of finger sandwiches, vegetable sticks, and cookie trays that every single event offers.

People like having options. They don’t want the same food they’ve had at hundreds of other events. Yet they also don’t want the only food available to be experimental haute cuisine that may or may not suit their tastes.

It’s best to have a variety of foods available to your event attendees. One that rewards experimentation while still providing old fallbacks for the less adventurous eaters.

Remember: People Eat With Their Eyes

People tend to eat with their eyes before they consume food with their mouths. That’s one of the reasons why presentation is so important for event catering.

What’s going to look better for your event attendees? An overburdened fold-up table stuffed with trays in disarray? Or a white-cloth-covered table with well-organized, well-plated food that begs for consumption?

The answer should be obvious.

Smell Is Part of Presentation

You might want to offer fish at your catering event to showcase its classiness. That’s all well and good but think about the last time someone brought leftover fish and heated it up in the office microwave.

Or, consider that one time you cooked something with a challenging smell that threatened to turn your stomach before you sat down to eat. How the event food smells while it cooks and sits out is as important as how it looks on the tables.

Think Beyond the Buffet

Many of the tips we provided here run on the assumption that you’re offering either plated catering or a buffet. However, these are not your only options to feed your guests.

If you have a large number of people to feed, consider offering boxed or bagged catering. Don’t have the space to have servers milling about? Let the attendees serve themselves.

Want More Event Catering Tips and Tricks?

Finding the right food can be one of the most difficult parts of event catering. However, as long as you keep your venue, target demographic, and food allergies in mind, you should be able to find the perfect food for your next event.

We hope you found this guide on how to select catered food helpful. Would you like to learn more about catering for special events, or event planning in general? If so, then check out our blog! We update each day with more helpful how-tos and guides like this one.