Academic Ventures - Personal, Cost-Effective Conference Planning

F&B: Per Quantity and Bites per Ounce

Determining how many ounces of hors d’oeuvres to order is not much different than figuring out how many bites to order. Let’s say you want to serve potato salad, which is sold by the ounce. Your attendees really like potato salad so you plan for 5 ounces per person. You easily can figure how many people a 50-ounce bowl of potato salad will serve.

So you order 10 bowls for 100 guests.

F&B: Per Quantity + Bites per Tray

Because we built the F&B budget based on number of bites and identified the average cost per bite, we can continue to use that math to place our order.

Let’s say you are hosting a cocktail reception for 100 people and want to provide an average of six bites per guest. Hors d’oeuvres are available in trays of 50. If you have 100 guests then you will want to order at least 600 bites of food or 12 trays of hors d’oeuvres. Simple, right?

What if cold hors d’oeuvres are available in trays of 50 but hot hors d’oeuvres are available in trays of 25? Look to the budget for your answers. It shows an average cost of hot hors d’oeuvres at $1.20 per bite and $1 per cold.

We opt for four hot bites per person (400 total) and two cold bites per person (200 total). We order four trays of cold hors d’oeuvres (50 per tray) and 16 trays of hot hors d’oeuvres (25 per tray).

F&B: PPQ…Pricing Per Quantity

We now look at the venue’s catering menu to translate the offerings to a per-bite number so we can be consistent with our F&B event budget format. This continues the F&B “per” pricing discussion.

Per-quantity pricing indicates the item is served in a designated quantity. You need to order multiples based on your expected attendance. Coffee is a good example of this – it usually costs less to buy by the urn. If your attendees want more coffee than the urn provides, you’ll need to order and buy more coffee by the urn from the venue (you can’t just ask for five cups of coffee).

This is how most reception pricing is done. In looking at hot or cold hors d’oeuvres you may see it priced per tray, per dozen or per 50 or even per ounce.