— Tammy Magid

All right, so Tammy, that's a bit of a complicated question because lots of caterings caterers do it differently now. I ran a very successful catering business for many years, um, and I usually did larger quantities or a larger amount, um, you know, larger amounts of people instead of just two. It actually gets a little trickier when you get down to a smaller amount because you're not buying your groceries in bulk, you're having to buy a very exact amount for each guest. Now. Now there's a rule that a lot of restaurants use, which is the third's rule, which is one third basically goes towards your ingredients, A third goes towards your pay for your staff or yourself, and then a third goes towards the profit as well for those. And that's a great rule to be able to kind of base things off of, but that fluctuates, of course, all over the place. Now, one of the best things you wanna do is be able to help price out your ingredients on what you're going to make. So make sure that you know ahead of time what you're going to be able to make for those two dinners and two breakfasts, um, and what ingredients you're going to need to be able to make those out. Um, I typically will have a list of recipes, um, or menu items basically for people to be able to choose from. And then I will price out those recipes according to, uh, how many servings you're basically doing of those. Now that takes experience and it takes a lot of time actually doing those. For your first catering gig, you're probably gonna have a little bit of gray area. Um, just give yourself a little bit of leeway on it and then look at the recipes that you, pardon me, that you want to prepare and you basically just want to go to your grocery store and price out all the things you need for each one of those. And then add on top of that for your price, for your labor. If you're the only, um, person that's actually cooking, that's great. Um, if you need to hire somebody for help or any other things that you actually need to be able to help transport those products or packaging, et cetera, things like that as well. Now, once you price out your groceries and then you actually price out the labor that goes into it or any product that you actually need, then you can add a charge on top of that for the profit of the catering gig. Now that depends on expertise. Um, you know, starting out catering, you don't get a whole lot of profit over the top to be able to make sure that you're getting people to be coming to your catering business. The more, um, experience you get, the higher the profit margin can be because quite frankly, you can be more in demand for it. So, um, you know, it just kind of depends on how many years of experience you get into it on the profit, um, and how much you can charge kind of over that, uh, standard amount. So I hope that helps a little bit, but again, every scenario is going to be different and uh, every caterer is going to do it a little bit differently. But starting out, just list out your ingredients, see how much it's going to cost you to be able to make those, and then remember to add in your time as the chef and if you have any people that you need to help assist you with that as well.