Arlene Sheff, CMP, former senior meeting and event planner for The Boeing Company and a veteran meetings educator, knows all about creatively planning food and beverage on a budget. Here are some money-saving tips she provided for Meetings Focus readers.
Know the demographics of your group:
You really need to know who you’re serving, and if you’re serving executives, you sometimes need to spend more money because they’re used to high-end restaurants, dinner parties and food, but they also don’t eat as much. For all types of groups, you need to avoid ordering shrimp, seafood or crab claws, unless you have a big enough budget to order sufficient amounts for your group—same thing for sushi.
Analyze the best ordering method:
Know your ordering options; You can buy coffee by the gallon, Danish and bagels by the dozen, usually the fruit by person, but then by knowing your group, you know how much to order. If you want to save money on coffee, you only put the coffee with the breakfast and then you roll away the coffee and don’t leave it outside the room all day.
Strategically figure out how items you order affect your budget:
Shrimp, meatballs—the smaller the item is and the quicker you can pop it in your mouth, the more people are going to eat. So you want to order hors d’oeuvres that are two bites instead of one bite. Passed hors d’oeuvres are the most cost-effective way to serve appetizers.
Order certain breakfast items based on consumption:
The best way to do breakfast, if you want to have protein options, I’d order the cheapest continental breakfast and then I buy the yogurt and the individual boxes of cereal on consumption. Otherwise, if you upgrade to the continental breakfast with more options, then the venue assumes people will eat both cereal and yogurt, and it will cost you more.
