Catering business is one of the most lucrative and profitable businesses with a high potential for expansion and growth. It is both financially rewarding and fun simply because on every single day, people, rich, poor, educated or illiterate need to eat. Once in a while, everyone has a special occasion when cooking for a large number of people is necessary. Events like birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, naming ceremonies, funerals all fall into this category but only caterers who are trained and experienced can cater on such occasions.

So how can you turn a canteen and catering business into a successful, money-spinner?

The catering business is a very lucrative business that you can start on a small scale and grow into a big business. One thing about the catering business is that you are sure of making steady profits from each event unless something really goes wrong.

In the catering business you make extra money because your client pays for your services and you never really use up all you bought for the event, which is another gain for you. Most times you make your profit from food because you can’t properly charge people for ingredients, firewood, or gas cooker usage. So it is essential to know how to do your calculation and billing.

The number one thing to consider when starting a catering business is to examine yourself if you are ready for responsibilities of a caterer. These responsibilities include: preparation of meals, delivering the meals, servicing the meals, gaining clients, organizing and planning, and most importantly customer service.

How to manage the business to make maximum profit

Quality of Food
A successful catering service requires tasty, top quality dishes and services at all times. Catering is not just about cooking but cooking a sumptuous meal. You don’t go into catering business because you feel the business is lucrative, you should go into the business because you are a good cook and you love cooking.

A party is not complete without food or snacks but once something goes wrong with the taste of your food, for example, if the food is salty, a lot of people won’t be able to eat the food and it becomes a waste and an embarrassment on your part. You could also loose clients and possibly prospects. You should learn how to cook different dishes, various African dishes, intercontinental dishes and even Chinese foods like Chinese rice.

Get the Best hands for your Catering business
No matter how much you love cooking, doing it for a large crowd could be cumbersome. In fact, not everyone who cooks well for a few can repeat the same feat for a crowd. You may not even have the time and energy to handle it alone even if you are good at cooking for a large audience. You can’t always handle the cooking all by yourself. That’s why you need extra hands popularly called Olopos (Kitchen hands in Yoruba) to assist you in your cooking and also to make it faster for you to be able to meet up with the delivery time of your clients. But make sure you monitor them so as to get the best result. They should have a good knowledge of various dishes and the combination of certain type of dishes.

Get involved in your Catering Business
You must be involved in the buying of your food items. Don’t always make it a habit of sending your kitchen hands to the market because you don’t know which of them might cheat you. If you have to, ensure you know the prices of the major food items and ingredients.

When running a canteen and you have people cooking for you, you should be able to give estimate of what they cook and sell. For example, you should be able to know how many wraps of eba (dish made from garri) you would get from 1 kongo (measure) of garri depending on how much you sell your eba either N20 or N50. If you make 2 kongo of garri in a day, you should be able to determine your profit from how much you bought the kongo of garri and how much you made from the wraps of eba. You should also be able to gauge how much you can make from a kongo of rice and other food stuff and you should be able to manage your profit.
If your business has grown to the point of killing a cow or goat, you will get more profit compared to buying in bits from the market. The profit you make on a daily basis differs. Most times, your profit also lies in the materials left because you would be buying in bulk.

Presentation of your meals
It is very important that the food is presented in a very attractive way. When you are serving your food on plates make sure there are no spills of food on the side of the plates, and when you are putting more than one food on a plate, ensure they are neatly placed beside one another.

When running a catering business, cleanliness should be given top priority and appetizing food would surely attract a large number of customers daily. The floors, table clothes, napkins, wash hand bowls must be clean regularly. Your servers should also be well dressed and smart. The clothes must be clean, hair covered and nails must be neatly manicured.

One responsibility of a caterer is getting the food to the event. This may seem easy, but it’s more difficult that you can imagine. This is because if you don’t have a truck or van, you may have to do multiple trips to get the food to the event. The solution will be to have a truck or van ready for transportation.

How to source for clients and manage them
Most clients are gotten through referrals. Word of mouth advertising doesn’t bring contacts very often except a prospect just decides to give you a trial. This is why you must ensure that you and your service people are at your best and your food is very well prepared. For every event catered for, take your complimentary cards along and distribute it to the attendees. Someone may just like your dishes enough to ask you to handle his or her event.

Make friends with different event planners so the can always call on you when they need caterers to handle their events. Make the most of social media, become an active blogger and promote yourself using facebook, twitter and other social media tools.

Let people around you, in the office, church or neighborhood know that you are into the catering business. You could print fliers and handbills to advertise your services. If you have a car or bus, brand it in your company name. You should also have a uniform with your company name and contact written on them.
The most efficient way of keeping your customers is to give your customers the best service and talk to them nicely. If customers are always asking for a particular type of food you don’t prepare, you should make it available. Be knowledgeable enough to know what dishes are appropriate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

How to get Jobs from Corporate Organizations
There are several corporate organizations and schools that don’t have a canteen or catering business within their premises. The effect of this is that workers, staff and pupils alike have to go outside the workplace or school premises to eat during lunch break. This in turn can expose them to unsafe and unhygienic dishes as well as other dangers like possible chaotic traffic on the streets.

This is an opportunity you can take advantage of. All you need is to get someone within the organization to tell you how to go about getting your catering service into the company or school, or you can write a proposal indicating your intention to cater for them during lunch break and office hours. With a reasonable price for take-away packs and a well cooked dish with additional fruits and desserts for the staff, you are sure to win the contract.

Source

what do you think about the article? do you have questions? lets discuss

Hi Jamji pls can u give me an idea of how †✽ write a proposal †✽ a corporate organusation.
Thanks

bece: Hi Jamji pls can u give me an idea of how †✽ write a proposal †✽ a corporate organusation.
Thanks

I only have sponsorship proposal idea, or do you mean a business plan?

Jamji: Catering business is one of the most lucrative and profitable businesses with a high potential for expansion and growth. It is both financially rewarding and fun simply because on every single day, people, rich, poor, educated or illiterate need to eat. Once in a while, everyone has a special occasion when cooking for a large number of people is necessary. Events like birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, naming ceremonies, funerals all fall into this category but only caterers who are trained and experienced can cater on such occasions.

So how can you turn a canteen and catering business into a successful, money-spinner?

The catering business is a very lucrative business that you can start on a small scale and grow into a big business. One thing about the catering business is that you are sure of making steady profits from each event unless something really goes wrong.

In the catering business you make extra money because your client pays for your services and you never really use up all you bought for the event, which is another gain for you. Most times you make your profit from food because you can’t properly charge people for ingredients, firewood, or gas cooker usage. So it is essential to know how to do your calculation and billing.

The number one thing to consider when starting a catering business is to examine yourself if you are ready for responsibilities of a caterer. These responsibilities include: preparation of meals, delivering the meals, servicing the meals, gaining clients, organizing and planning, and most importantly customer service.

How to manage the business to make maximum profit

Quality of Food
A successful catering service requires tasty, top quality dishes and services at all times. Catering is not just about cooking but cooking a sumptuous meal. You don’t go into catering business because you feel the business is lucrative, you should go into the business because you are a good cook and you love cooking.

A party is not complete without food or snacks but once something goes wrong with the taste of your food, for example, if the food is salty, a lot of people won’t be able to eat the food and it becomes a waste and an embarrassment on your part. You could also loose clients and possibly prospects. You should learn how to cook different dishes, various African dishes, intercontinental dishes and even Chinese foods like Chinese rice.

Get the Best hands for your Catering business
No matter how much you love cooking, doing it for a large crowd could be cumbersome. In fact, not everyone who cooks well for a few can repeat the same feat for a crowd. You may not even have the time and energy to handle it alone even if you are good at cooking for a large audience. You can’t always handle the cooking all by yourself. That’s why you need extra hands popularly called Olopos (Kitchen hands in Yoruba) to assist you in your cooking and also to make it faster for you to be able to meet up with the delivery time of your clients. But make sure you monitor them so as to get the best result. They should have a good knowledge of various dishes and the combination of certain type of dishes.

Get involved in your Catering Business
You must be involved in the buying of your food items. Don’t always make it a habit of sending your kitchen hands to the market because you don’t know which of them might cheat you. If you have to, ensure you know the prices of the major food items and ingredients.

When running a canteen and you have people cooking for you, you should be able to give estimate of what they cook and sell. For example, you should be able to know how many wraps of eba (dish made from garri) you would get from 1 kongo (measure) of garri depending on how much you sell your eba either N20 or N50. If you make 2 kongo of garri in a day, you should be able to determine your profit from how much you bought the kongo of garri and how much you made from the wraps of eba. You should also be able to gauge how much you can make from a kongo of rice and other food stuff and you should be able to manage your profit.
If your business has grown to the point of killing a cow or goat, you will get more profit compared to buying in bits from the market. The profit you make on a daily basis differs. Most times, your profit also lies in the materials left because you would be buying in bulk.

Presentation of your meals
It is very important that the food is presented in a very attractive way. When you are serving your food on plates make sure there are no spills of food on the side of the plates, and when you are putting more than one food on a plate, ensure they are neatly placed beside one another.

When running a catering business, cleanliness should be given top priority and appetizing food would surely attract a large number of customers daily. The floors, table clothes, napkins, wash hand bowls must be clean regularly. Your servers should also be well dressed and smart. The clothes must be clean, hair covered and nails must be neatly manicured.

One responsibility of a caterer is getting the food to the event. This may seem easy, but it’s more difficult that you can imagine. This is because if you don’t have a truck or van, you may have to do multiple trips to get the food to the event. The solution will be to have a truck or van ready for transportation.

How to source for clients and manage them
Most clients are gotten through referrals. Word of mouth advertising doesn’t bring contacts very often except a prospect just decides to give you a trial. This is why you must ensure that you and your service people are at your best and your food is very well prepared. For every event catered for, take your complimentary cards along and distribute it to the attendees. Someone may just like your dishes enough to ask you to handle his or her event.

Make friends with different event planners so the can always call on you when they need caterers to handle their events. Make the most of social media, become an active blogger and promote yourself using facebook, twitter and other social media tools.

Let people around you, in the office, church or neighborhood know that you are into the catering business. You could print fliers and handbills to advertise your services. If you have a car or bus, brand it in your company name. You should also have a uniform with your company name and contact written on them.
The most efficient way of keeping your customers is to give your customers the best service and talk to them nicely. If customers are always asking for a particular type of food you don’t prepare, you should make it available. Be knowledgeable enough to know what dishes are appropriate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

How to get Jobs from Corporate Organizations
There are several corporate organizations and schools that don’t have a canteen or catering business within their premises. The effect of this is that workers, staff and pupils alike have to go outside the workplace or school premises to eat during lunch break. This in turn can expose them to unsafe and unhygienic dishes as well as other dangers like possible chaotic traffic on the streets.

This is an opportunity you can take advantage of. All you need is to get someone within the organization to tell you how to go about getting your catering service into the company or school, or you can write a proposal indicating your intention to cater for them during lunch break and office hours. With a reasonable price for take-away packs and a well cooked dish with additional fruits and desserts for the staff, you are sure to win the contract.

Source

yea i do @jamji

how do i locate catering school where continental dishes are taught

ola andru:

yea i do @jamji

how do i locate catering school where continental dishes are taught

It depends where you are precisely and your choice of location. You should set it up in a busy area thats in Town.

Thank you Sir.

You can ask your questions concerning this article.

dppfpf

Patphil Catering Services – Christmas parties, End of Year Party, launch, Company celebrations and promotional events.
Meticulous events big or small that need a menu that will be remembered, excellent service to impress and unparalleled efficiency in planning and coordination to ensure your event will happen the way you want it to.

Large Scale Off-Premise Events Catering – Company outings, retreat, and off location celebrations. Events that require consistency in food quality and guaranteed food safety. We have done events for as large as 2,500 and still exceeded our client’s expectations.
Catering for Seminars and Whole Day Activitie

- Training Seminars, Conventions, and Company meetings. For any event that needs attentive service and sumptuous food beyond the usual lunch or dinner, we offer competitively price full board packages that include breakfast, snacks, lunch and dinner.
Corporate Canteens - We offer a complete range of corporate canteens services, including breakfast, tea break and lunch. our services can be customized to suit your exact need.


• To provide highly nutritious and healthy meals
• To identify the needs of target markets
• To produce goods and services of excellent standards to meet the specific needs.


• our customer must get the best possible service at a reasonable price
• Individuals must be respected and customer care is paramount
• Excellent superior performance must be pursued
We are looking forward to your patronage and we assure you that we give satisfactory services.
Office Address: 7 canal avenue okota
Okota, Lagos,
Nigeria.

Phone NO: 08112658211
Thank you.