Breakfast. It’s the most important meal of the day.
Many businesses have their meetings in the morning and want to have a catered solution that includes both a coffee bar and some food. You’ll need to decide if you want to offer food as part of your package. There are 3 possible options you can consider:
Partner With A Full-Service Caterer
Many times we’ll have full-service caterers contact us to provide a coffee bar as a subcontractor. In these cases, we don’t have to provide the food (which we prefer). We just do what we do best and setup our coffee bar. The downside to this is that you then don’t own the relationship with the person/company, the caterer does. However, when you do a great job, don’t be surprised if you become the coffee service of choice for that caterer. We have ongoing relationships with many large food caterers in our area for whom we are the preferred gourmet coffee bar provider. It’s a win-win-win relationship.
Make A Business Decision To Not Offer Food
If you don’t offer food in your coffee shop, then you may want to make the business decision that you won’t offer food as part of your catering packages. You don’t want to offer something for which you really don’t have experience in doing and you’ll likely need to invest in equipment and supplies to do it. If you’re only going to have a few catering jobs each year that require food, it’s probably a prudent decision to stick to what you do best. When prospective catering clients contact us and want a full-service breakfast package, we let them know that we specialize in gourmet coffee bars, not the food and we then refer them to one of our partner catering companies (see above – you refer business to them, they’ll refer business to you). We’ve never lost a job because we couldn’t provide the food. The clients actually appreciate the honesty and serving them by providing a referral to someone who will do a great job.
Provide Light Breakfast Options
There are many light breakfast options you can provide that don’t require a chef, mobile cooking equipment, and/or equipment to keep food warm or cold. Yogurt parfait bars are simple to add on to your coffee catering packages. Here are some ideas how you can set this up:
Adding on a yogurt parfait package to your coffee catering can be a simple, fun and highly profitable add-on.
Are you offering food as part of your coffee catering packages? Leave us a comment below.
