A caterer is busy on the dates customers choose, not the dates you would pick. Here is how to build a core team, a trusted pool of temporary hands and a central kitchen that runs to a plan.
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Share your requirementsA caterer cooks for weddings, corporate lunches, parties, canteen contracts and festival gatherings, usually from a central kitchen and often for several events on the same date. Work arrives in lumps. An order is confirmed, the menu is fixed, quantities are worked out, and then a kitchen crew prepares, packs and dispatches while a service crew travels to the venue to set up, serve and clear. Cooks and head chefs hold the recipes and the taste that customers remember, and a regular core team is joined by waiters, helpers, loaders and drivers who are brought in for the day. Many of those hands work for more than one caterer in the same season. See also HR for food and beverage. What makes HR different here is that the workforce is rebuilt for every event. Who is on the crew list, who has been briefed on hygiene, who is paid and when, and who is trusted to lead a service counter are decisions repeated all season, so a firm that keeps a simple record of its people and writes down how an event crew is formed spends the peak serving food and not chasing names.
These are the places the people side of this kind of business tends to give way. The rest of this page works through them.
HR here has to work for each of these groups, not only the office. The set-up below is written with all of them in mind.
Auspicious dates and holiday weekends pile several events onto one day, and the next week may be quiet.
The captain knows who to call, and when he leaves the firm loses the contacts and the quality that came with them.
A crew that is three short at the venue cannot be fixed by the kitchen, and the customer remembers the service, not the food.
Handwashing, cap and glove use, storage and cooling are followed in the central kitchen and slip at a venue with no supervisor.
Prep starts before dawn for a late dinner service, travel home is unplanned and overtime is settled by memory.
Quantities and tastings are carried by the senior cooks, so a departure changes the food.
Day rates, food allowance, transport and settlement dates are agreed verbally, and complaints arrive when a payment is late.
Start with the topics that matter most here: HR Strategy and Workforce Planning; Recruitment and Talent Acquisition; Health, Safety and Wellbeing. Then work through the rest. Each topic is written for food and beverage, not in general.
How many people, in which roles, by when — and what they will cost.
Requisition to joining, the same way every time.
Induction, records, incident reporting and follow-through.
Structure, reporting lines and who is allowed to decide what.
A first day that is the same for the fifth joiner as the first.
Records, attendance, leave and the day-to-day HR that must simply work.
Salary structure, payroll inputs and a month that closes on time.
Goals, reviews and ratings that hold up in a conversation.
Training planned from need rather than from the calendar.
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
Communication, recognition and the conditions people actually work in.
Two routes — one for complaints, one for conduct — kept separate.
Policies a manager can apply, and obligations with owners and dates.
Who leaves, when, why — and which of them mattered.
Resignation to relieving letter, in a defined order.
Records that survive people, and approvals that do not queue.
A short monthly pack management actually reads.
An HR function that runs the same way every month.
The pieces a caterers and event kitchens business puts in place, in an order that makes each easier. Open any card for the detail.
Menu, headcount, roles, reporting time and who leads, issued before the day.
What this coversHideMenu, headcount, roles, reporting time and who leads, issued before the day. The workforce plan shows how to size a core team against the busiest dates.
Name, identity, contact, skills, past events and how they performed, so reliable people can be called back and weak ones are not.
What this coversHideName, identity, contact, skills, past events and how they performed, so reliable people can be called back and weak ones are not. The employee information management holds it.
A short briefing before each event and a record of who attended, with a senior person at every venue.
What this coversHideA short briefing before each event and a record of who attended, with a senior person at every venue. The health, safety and wellbeing work covers the routine.
Day rate, meals, travel, late-night allowance and the date of settlement, told to people before they accept.
What this coversHideDay rate, meals, travel, late-night allowance and the date of settlement, told to people before they accept. The compensation strategy sets the principles.
Reporting times, breaks, transport home after a late finish and rest before the next event.
What this coversHideReporting times, breaks, transport home after a late finish and rest before the next event.
Written quantities, plating and tasting notes, and a junior cook paired with each senior so the standard outlasts one person.
What this coversHideWritten quantities, plating and tasting notes, and a junior cook paired with each senior so the standard outlasts one person.
Before changing anything, find out what is true today. These checks take an afternoon and tell you which of the topics above to start with.
Share your requirementsConfirm with a qualified professional. What applies to you depends on your business, your state and your arrangements, and it changes. This page describes practice. It does not state a legal position.
The services below fit this kind of business best. Each starts by recording where you stand, and every later report compares against that. We do not promise outcomes.
A plan that sizes a core team and a pool of temporary hands against your busiest dates.
A simple way to find, check and bring back dependable cooks, captains and servers.
Food handling routines and briefings that hold at a venue as well as in the kitchen.
Clear reporting times, breaks and rest around long event days.
Start with a free conversation, or see the paid HR Diagnostic.
Understand the business, its workforce, current processes and HR challenges.
Find the missing, weak, inconsistent or person-dependent processes.
Create the structure, processes, policies, SOPs, dashboards and systems needed.
Help HR and department managers actually adopt the new system.
Digitise repetitive and approval-based workflows where it is worth doing.
Track hiring, attendance, employee cost, performance, training and attrition.
Strengthen the people-management system continuously, not once.
From the GullyHR blog: one on HR in food and beverage, and one on each of the topics this page points to.
Kitchen, service and outlet staff leave quickly in food and beverage. How to ask what lies behind the first answer, compare outlets and act on what you learn.
7 min readRead article
Hiring decisions made one request at a time, in the month the pain is worst. What a workforce plan contains and why a twelve-month view changes what you hire.
7 min readRead article
Candidates who accept and never arrive are usually lost in the silence between offer and joining. What actually causes it, and a contact plan that closes the gap.
8 min readRead article
A laminated notice, an annual drill, and an incident register with three entries in two years. What workplace health and safety looks like when it is real.
7 min readRead articleMore on the GullyHR blog.
Confirm the crew a few days ahead, keep a few names beyond the number you need, and tell people clearly where to report, when and for what pay. A reliable register matters more than a long phone contact list.
Ask your captains and cooks for people they trust, note how each person did at the event, and bring the good ones back first. Over a season you build a pool that you know.
Identity, contact, skills, the events worked, any food handling briefing attended and how payment was made. Confirm with a qualified professional what you must keep for the arrangement you use.
Brief the crew before each event, put one senior person in charge of food handling there and use a short checklist for storage, cooling and serving. A routine holds when the owner is not present.
Agree the day rate, meals, travel and late-night allowance before the event, put it in writing and settle on the date you promised. Late payment is the quickest way to lose a good pool.
Write down quantities and methods, pair each senior cook with a junior and recognise the people who teach. Confirm any restrictive terms with a qualified professional.
Big enough to run the central kitchen and lead every event in a normal week, with the peak met by trained temporary staff. Look at last season's bookings by month before deciding.
We would go through your busiest dates and the crews each needed, how captains build those crews, and whether names and contact details of temporary staff are held anywhere beyond a phone. Event pay after a big booking and recipes known to one cook would come up. A first piece of work could be a written crew plan and register. Scope is agreed in writing afterwards.
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