Our goal is to find a way to have meaningful F&B costs in an early-stage budget even though we are a long way from selecting a menu.
While many items in our F&B events are already priced per person, reception food frequently is charged by the quantity, creating some work to be done but with a little math and a little finesse we can translate these menus items into our a per-person format.
To develop a good estimated cost we can get the price-per-large-quantity hot and cold hors d’oeuvres into an average per-bite price that we will use to generate both meaningful cost estimates early on and the ability to select menu items at a later date.
To do this I like to play the average.
Let’s say we are putting together an event for an academic conference that includes a reception during which attendees can browse through poster presentations. We are not at the point of picking a menu but we need to factor in the cost of this F&B event to set our registration fee. So what numbers should we use?
Simply review the venue’s catering menu and average the costs of hot hors d’oeuvres and cold hors d’oeuvres. I can then adjust the number of estimated attendees and the number of bites being offered.
Let’s explore… look at the following menu:
Hot hors d’oeuvres …
Petite Quiche $10.05 per dozen
Chicken Satays $16.30 per dozen
Spanakopita $45.80 per hundred
Toasted Ravioli $ 9.20 per dozen
Cold hors d’oeuvres…
Smoked Salmon $10.20 per dozen
Antipasto $ 2.35 per person
Peel and Eat Shrimp $12.75 per dozen
First order of business is to get everything into the same quantities so I would use $5.52 per dozen for the Spanakopita ($45.80 divided by 100 then multiplied by 12). And I would leave the Antipasto out of the equation for now.
Next I would do the simple math of adding the four hot hors d’oeuvres prices together and dividing that sum by the number of choices (four) to get an average price of a hot hors d’oeuvre of $10.27 per dozen (the sum of 10.05 + 16.30 + 5.52 + 9.20 divided by four). And doing the same exercise yields and average cold hors d’oeuvres price of $11.48 (the sum of 10.20 + 12.75 divided by two).
Once I know the average price of these menu items I can plug them into my working budget. However, as we’ll see, there is a little more math to do.
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