Bird’s Eye View Of The Catering Industry

Customers today are looking for the catered experience to be more restaurant-like, more personal and conversational. Catering by definition is the business of providing food service at a remote outdoor site or an indoor site such as a hotel, banquets, hospitals, or convention hall.

According to the data report available at RestaurantIndia.com, Catering is one of the fastest-growing segments of the Hospitality industry. The estimated size of the catering singapore industry is 20,000 crores (as per FY 2016) with CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) of 25-30 per cent.

Catering Offers High-income Potential

Many people leave the world of business, advertising, law, and medicine to begin a second career in catering. While catering can be a lucrative career, it is important to keep all the aspects of the job in perspective. Catering needs hard work, and often the easiest part of the job is food preparation. When you’re catering to an outdoor event for 500 people, someone has to load and unload, and then load up again. More often than not, it can be you.

Forego Your Social Events

Catering involves long working hours and you have to work when everybody else is having a gala time. Not only on the day of the event, but you need to put in a lot of effort for many days, weeks, and even months before the execution date arrives.

For Catering professionals, dinners, evening get-togethers, weekends and lunchtime are bread and butter times, not the downtimes.
• With catering, timing is paramount.
• Your ability to multi-tasking helps in organizing time with astute precision. You must always be ready for the unexpected.
• A caterer has to develop a checklist-based mindset to encounter the highly unexpected.

Skills Needed in the Catering Business

1. Broad Understanding of Cooking & Cuisine

Catered events, unlike restaurant meals, are usually centred around a special event such as a product launch or a social event like wedding. As such, people expect more when attending an event. The food has to be outstanding. You don’t necessarily need to be cook/chef to be in the business of mini buffet catering but you certainly need to know how the food should taste. It’s all about capturing taste buds and the ability to understand the method of cooking which helps you with better storytelling. Remember, it’s an experimental business and has to titillate all sense organs – Look, smell, touch, sound and taste. With a lack of understanding of the process, you might have to introduce the chef every time leaving an image of an amateur in front of your client.

2. Food Styling

The irony of food in present times is that you can make the best quality of food and explore new better cuisines with help of your amazing chefs but eventually at catered events, ‘Table-Scaping’ (how beautifully the caterer can present food) is a major differentiator that sets you apart from the competition. Have you ever imagined a simple Rajma-Chawal served in mini copper handis, or Sushi being served over a Tree Platter? Such out of box thinking epitomizes the quote that ’Winners don’t do different things, but they do things differently’- Shiv Khera.

Nowadays, mature catering companies are hiring dedicated food stylists on freelance or permanently, because the clients demand it. Even for some venues (and especially for some clients), you will be told that presentation is the most important factor, but no matter how artistically the food is presented, if it doesn’t taste good, it doesn’t make the cut.