Outside of accommodations, F&B is often the second-largest budget-chewer, and arguably is one of the things attendees will remember the most about your meeting—first impressions, in this case, are crucial to not leaving a bad taste in your clients’ mouths.
One veteran planner who has navigated many attendees around a buffet station or seated them in a banquet round is Marjorie Risinger, CMP, a meetings industry consultant who will deliver two F&B presentations during HSMAI’s MEET Mid-America, held April 3-4 at Chicago’ Navy Pier: “Tips and Trends in Food and Beverage” and “The Three C’s of Food and Beverage: Chef, Catering Manager and Client.” For more information about HSMAI's MEET, visit http://events.jspargo.com/AMMA12/public/MainHall.aspx or www.hsmaimeet.com.
According to Risinger, besides being one the larger items in a meeting budget, the F&B component is also a top-of-mind issue for attendees.
“The first thing is the temperature of the room and the second is the food and beverage,” she contends.
According to Risinger, one of the best ways to ensure quality and low cost is to leave the initial food and beverage planning in the hands of an expert: the facility’s F&B team.
“I really like the chef and catering manager to do the work,” she says. “I give them the budget and have them worry about filling it in.”
Besides lessening the workload on the meeting planner, Risinger says the F&B team, if given a chance, will often implement creative solutions to incorporate fresh cuisine at a palatable price point.
“A lot of planners don’t give the chef the chance to buy local—that’s where you save money, when you get food that is plentiful during that time of year,” she says. “I tell them I have to have a beef entrée, but I let the chef tell me what he can get in my price range at that time.”
Besides the benefits of nutrition and great taste, locally sourced food is also a key component of a sustainable meeting.
“A lot of meeting planners are even requesting that a certain percentage of their food be local, to help eliminate the carbon footprint,” she says. “And it also supports the local farmers.”
One of the biggest tips, according to Risinger, centers on making cost-cutting requests that appeal to the facility’s books, and while to the uninitiated the tip may seem like a quibble of semantics between the terms rebate and discount, the end result can be quite appetizing.
“I hesitate to tell you the biggest tip I got from a catering manager,” she reveals. “Ask for a rebate on your food and beverage and not a discount. The difference between a discount and a rebate is a rebate comes out of the general budget, like the sleeping room commission, it doesn’t come out of the catering manager’s budget or the gratuity for the servers.
“When you ask for a percentage off the menu price [a discount] that takes, let’s say, a $10 meal and makes it $9, that makes the catering manager’s budget $9 instead of $10,” she adds. “Versus the catering manager getting the full $10 in her budget and the 10 percent rebate comes out of the general operating funds of the hotel--not the catering budget--that way it doesn’t reduce the amount of gratuity that all of their servers get.”
Following are some other tips and trends Risinger says will cook up a pleasing F&B program for attendees.
· Use infused water stations instead of bottled water, because bottled water is not green. Chefs can use overripe fruit and mix it with sugar for attendees to drink at stations outside of the meeting rooms.
· Pies are a really hot item these days, and can be served in many ways, from pie on a stick to the traditional slices of pie that are a quintessential American comfort food.
· Many chefs, including The Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel’s Manfred Lassahn, are shying away from communal vegetable dipping, and instead provide guests with individual glasses of vegetables with the dip on the bottom.
· Consider serving a four-course meal all on one plate—a square plate with smaller plates on it, with soup, salad, a “main course” and dessert, which Chef Lassahn often does at the Century Plaza. Risinger says this is especially good for a business lunch in that you can serve attendees a satisfying lunch in an hour or less.
· Sustainability is still a key driver: “Everybody is in to being healthier,” Risinger says, “and even if they aren’t, local foods just taste better because they’re picked ripe, they’re fresh and they taste wonderful. The chefs are all going to the farmers markets, and many are raising food right on their rooftops.”
· Ask about “dead-stock” wine: “When a new catering manager comes into a hotel he has his favorite wines, so he retools the wine list and some of it goes off and is no longer advertised,” she says. “That wine is still good and it’s in the wine cellar, but you can get it for 50 percent off because it’s not on the menu. If you’re concerned about it you should taste it.”
· Use plastic tokens for drinks instead of a hosted bar, which will save a lot of money, makes budget forecasting much more accurate and also reduces legal liability. Make sure to tell waiters not to pick up any glasses that have liquid in them, however.
For further research, Risinger recommends consulting the following websites:
American Cancer Society’s Meeting Well brochure: www.acsworkplacesolutions.com/meetingwell.asp
Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch: www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx
Environmental Working Group’s Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides: www.ewg.org/foodnews
