5 Reasons To Order Online For Corporate Catering

Most corporate catering in Brisbane is still ordered the way it was twenty years ago. Somebody rings a kitchen at twenty past four, reads a list out from memory, and hopes it went down correctly at the other end. Most of the time it does. The person standing in front of a room at eleven the next morning is the one carrying the risk of the times it does not.

We have been catering out of Fortitude Valley since 2005 and we take orders both ways, over the phone and through the website. The typed ones go wrong less often. That is not a sales pitch, it is what the order sheets look like at the end of a busy week. A phone call is a conversation that disappears the moment it ends. A typed order is a document both sides can read back.

What follows is a plain account of why ordering office catering online works better for the person organising it, and the handful of things worth getting right either way.

THE FUTURE OF FOOD ORDERING ONLINE

The interesting change was never the ordering. It was the record.

When an order arrives typed, the words the kitchen works from are the words the customer wrote. Nobody has transcribed thirty as thirteen. Nobody has heard "no nuts" halfway through a sentence about parking and put it in the margin. The docket that goes up on the rail carries the customer's own line about the coeliac in accounts, in their own spelling, and it is still there at six the next morning when the person reading it has never spoken to them.

The second change is when people order. Anyone who has been handed the catering for a Thursday board meeting is doing that job on top of a real one, in the gaps of a day: on the train, between meetings, at ten at night once the house is quiet. A phone line only works while somebody is standing next to it. An order form works at any hour, which is most of the point of it.

None of this makes the food better. Bread does not care how it was ordered. What it changes is the number of places an order can go wrong between the person who wants lunch and the oven, and in catering almost every disaster is a communication failure rather than a cooking one. Nobody has ever rung us to complain that a sandwich was badly made. They ring because it went to the wrong floor, or because there were forty people and food for thirty.

Why the cut-off is 4pm

Underneath all of it sits a deadline that has nothing to do with the internet. Our cut-off is 4pm for next-day delivery, and that time is set by the bake rather than by the website. The prep list for tomorrow is written in the afternoon, doughs are set that night, and an order that lands at half past four lands after the list has gone up. The website is simply the thing that lets you hit that deadline at 3.50pm from a phone in a car park instead of hoping someone picks up.

1. Quick search and saves time

The time an online order saves is not the ten minutes spent placing it. It is the three phone calls that never have to happen afterwards.

A phone order is rarely one call. There is the call to order, the call back to confirm the numbers once the head count firms up, and the call two days out to check it is still in the book. Each one pulls somebody out of what they were doing, and the last one exists purely because there is no written proof. A typed order with a confirmation email covers all three at once, because the confirmation is the proof.

How much to order per head

What genuinely saves time, though, is knowing the quantities before you start. These are the numbers we would give anyone over the phone anyway.

• Allow one and a half rounds a head for a working lunch, and one a head for a morning tea where there is something else on the table.
• Order about a third more of the vegetarian than you have vegetarians. Everybody eats it, not only the people who asked for it.
• For an all-day session, split the order across the day rather than sending it all at ten. Food that sits out for six hours is not catering, it is a slow decline.
• Round up rather than down on anything sweet. A leftover slice is a nuisance. A room of thirty with twenty-eight portions is a problem you will hear about.

The single most useful thing to type into the notes field is the time the food will be eaten, not the time you would like it delivered. Those are two different problems and only one of them is ours to solve. An eleven o'clock delivery for a one o'clock lunch means two hours of a warm room working on platters that were cut at six that morning, and the fix is almost always to move the drop rather than to change the menu.

If the timing is tight at your end instead, pick-up runs from 7am at 159 Knapp St in Fortitude Valley, which is often the simpler answer for an early start. Somebody collects on the way in and the food is on the table before the room fills up.

2. Safe payments and easy assessment

The valuable part of paying online is not really the payment. It is the emailed confirmation that lands afterwards with the total, the date, the delivery address and every line of the order on it.

The person who organises office catering is almost never the person who approves the spend. An automatically issued tax receipt saves the small indignity of ringing a bakery three weeks later to ask for a copy of an invoice for an expense claim, and it saves us digging through a week of dockets to find it. Forward that same email to whoever sits on reception or runs the security desk, and the driver gets through the front door without ringing anybody.

Being able to see the cost before committing matters more than it sounds, because catering is one of the few purchases people are expected to budget for without a price list. Delivery starts at $19 on orders over $150, we run to more than 50 Brisbane suburbs, and Saturday is the same rate as a weekday. There is no last-minute surcharge either. An order placed at 3.55pm costs exactly what the same order placed on Monday costs, because the only thing the clock changes is whether it makes tomorrow's list.

Two practical points about the details you type in, both learned the hard way by drivers.

• The mobile number on the order should belong to somebody who will answer it at that hour. The desk phone of the person chairing the meeting is the worst number on the form, because at the moment the driver needs them they are in the room the food is for.
• Address the order to the door the food actually arrives at, not the one on the letterhead. Loading dock, after-hours entry, which lift, which level, whether the roller door is down before seven. Three lines of instruction beat a building name every time.

3. We are the best caterer in Brisbane

Best is not a thing anyone can prove, and a caterer who tells you they are the best is telling you what they hope rather than what they know. Here is what can actually be checked instead.

Everything we send out is made by hand in the kitchen at 159 Knapp St, Fortitude Valley, and has been since 2005. Bread is baked and platters are built on the morning of the delivery rather than the night before, because sandwiches made at five in the morning for an eleven o'clock meeting have six hours to go wrong before anybody eats them. And the van that turns up is ours.

The two questions worth asking any caterer, ours included, are what time the food is made and who is driving it. The answers predict what lands on the table far better than a star rating does, because they are the only two variables that a kitchen cannot talk its way around.

Food that does not travel well

In the same spirit, a few things do not travel, and no ordering system on earth fixes that. It is worth knowing which is which before you build a menu.

• Anything fried is excellent for about fifteen minutes and ordinary after thirty. Order calamari only when the food and the people arrive at the same time.
• Nachos go soft within about twenty minutes of meeting the sauce, so the components travel separately and get put together in the room.
• Buttercream is comfortable up to about twenty-five degrees. A cake sitting in a car at midday in February is well past it, and a cake left near a window in a meeting room is not much better off.
• Bread stales fastest at fridge temperature, which is the opposite of what everyone assumes. Leftovers do better on the bench under a cloth than in the office fridge.

Say the awkward part out loud when you order and it stops being a problem. A menu built around what survives the trip is a better lunch than a menu built around what reads well.

4. Modern website interface

The parts of a catering website that matter are the dull ones.

Serves are stated as a number of people rather than as small, medium and large, because small is not a unit of measurement and nobody has ever agreed on what it means. A platter that says it serves ten serves ten, and you can add up a room without ringing anyone.

Dietary requirements are marked in the product names themselves, so they show up in a list without opening a single page: gluten free, vegetarian, vegan, dairy free. That removes a phone call, and more importantly it removes the moment in a meeting where somebody has to put their hand up and explain themselves in order to get lunch. Ordering two or three dietary items as a matter of course, whether or not anybody has declared one, is the cheapest hospitality there is.

Lead times appear at the point of ordering rather than after a promise. Decorated cakes and cupcakes need two to three business days, because icing work is done by hand and cannot be hurried on the morning of. A website tells you that before you commit. A phone call sometimes tells you afterwards, which is how a birthday ends up with a plain cake and an apology.

Order history is the underrated feature. If the same Tuesday board meeting eats the same thing every month, the second order takes about a minute and comes out identical to the first, down to which halves are the dietary ones. Recurring catering is mostly an exercise in not re-deciding, and the fastest way to get it wrong is to rebuild the order from memory each time.

5. We are not a market place

On a marketplace, the person you message is not the person cooking, and the person driving works for neither of them. Three parties, two handovers, and nobody who can answer the only question anybody ever asks on the day, which is where the food is.

We are one kitchen. One address, one phone number, one van, one prep list with your name on it. When something changes at your end, and it usually does, there is a single place to ring and the person who answers can see the docket in front of them. Numbers move from thirty to forty-five more often than they move the other way, and the answer to that depends entirely on whether anyone can still reach the bench in time.

How the food is packed

Owning both ends also changes how the food is packed, and that is the part that shows up on the table. Because we know how long the run is and what order the drops fall in, dressings go separately for anything that has to sit, hot and cold items are kept out of the same box so they are not sweating at each other, and the platters going to the far end of the run are the ones built last. A courier collecting from a shared kitchen cannot do any of that, because nobody in the chain knows what is in the box or how long it has to survive.

The packaging is kraft trays, paper and cardboard, never clear plastic. Partly because it is compostable and partly for a duller reason: paper does not sweat the way a sealed plastic lid does, and condensation on the inside of a lid ends up on the bread. One thing worth knowing about a lidded tray is that the lid should stay on until the last possible minute. A platter unwrapped at nine for an eleven o'clock meeting dries at the edges, and there is nothing anybody can do about it afterwards.

Ordering online will not make a sandwich taste better. What it does is shorten the list of things that can go wrong between deciding to feed a room and the room being fed, and it lets the person doing the organising get it off their desk at whatever hour they finally get to it.

The full catering range sits on the Mr. T's bakery website, with serve counts and dietary marks on every item. Order by 4pm and it arrives the next day, delivery from $19 on orders over $150 across more than 50 Brisbane suburbs, Saturday at the same rate, or pick up from 7am at 159 Knapp St. Put the time the food is being eaten in the notes, and we will work backwards from that.