Catering a corporate event in a city like Melbourne --- or nearly anywhere, for that matter --- can be a tricky business. You can find the best corporate catering companies in Melbourne but still can get things wrong. Among the many things you could misjudge, here are a few:

• The food --- too spicy, lacking universal appeal, nothing local

• The atmosphere --- too formal and stuffy, or perhaps too casual

• The location --- too far away, too hard to find

• ...the list goes on…

So, there are many things that can go wrong, but that’s not news. How can we help to make sure that our next corporate event is catered just right? There are a few key things to which you should pay special attention.

Don’t Make the Food too Fancy or Pretentious

The well-remembered American labor activist Cesar Chavez said that “If you really want to make a friend, go to someone’s house and eat with him...The people who give you their food give you their heart.” This can teach corporate event organisers something important about catering for their events. Such events are about bringing people together to share knowledge and experiences, or celebrate some achievement that they have shared together.

Therefore, the food at these events should also reflect that sense of enjoyment, togetherness and positive feeling. Those things come from good, honest and simple food; comfort food that stirs the soul and is easy to share and love.

Source High-Quality, Local Food from Nearby Providers

No matter the size of your event, you always make the catering a more genuine and positive experience when you involve local companies of all sizes. If the event is too big for one small company to handle, then bring in more than one. That has the added benefit of augmenting people’s choices at the event.

Local food demonstrates your commitment to an area, and shows visiting guests from afar some of the local flair that the area has to offer. People love to see locals preparing tasty and wholesome food that they may well eat themselves at home. What’s more, your business can build strong connections with other community businesses, and that’s always a good thing.

Offer Quality, but also Cost-Effectiveness and Sustainability

It may seem a bit miserly to be thinking about money when you’re planning catering for an important corporate event, but at the end of the day, everything costs money. There was a time when being as lavish as possible was the order of the day, and indeed in some parts of the world like China, it still is.

There’s a changing mood nowadays in Australia and other developed countries. Young up and coming professionals care a lot more about sustainability than they do about decadence. Overt and ostentatious displays at corporate events will be seen as wasteful, in poor taste and also a demonstration of poor judgement. If this is how they spend on simple corporate events, how do they manage the rest of their balance sheet?

Organic and sustainably sourced food, eco-friendly biodegradable flatware, and not a single exploitative corporate logo in sight. In the current climate, showing off your green and sustainable credentials is an important part of an enterprise’s image. One ignores it at their own peril. What’s more, it has to appear genuine, and not a cynical attempt to merely appear green.

Focus on Customer Service

Finally, one element that has not changed is the importance of good customer service. You need a provider that will listen carefully to your needs, adapt their offering to suit those needs, and provide a service that is commensurate with all of the above points we mentioned. Often you get this a lot more from small- to medium-sized local providers than you would from a larger corporate provider.