From gluten-free sandwiches to almond milk lattes, everyone knows someone with special dietary requirements! While this presents a challenge for event catering in Sydney, planning well in advance helps you navigate food intolerances and preferences.
Here's a couple of tips for smooth catering and keeping all your guests happy with the menu.
1. Understand special dietary needs
It helps to understand different dietary requirements to ensure easy communication between you, your guests and the catering company. The most common include:
Gluten-free diets, whereby people have an intolerance to staples like wheat, barley and rye. Foods that contain gluten include bread, pasta, pastry and noodles.
Dairy-free diets are for individuals who experience lactose intolerance when eating cheese, yogurt and milk products.
Vegetarian diets don’t include meat, however, many vegetarians eat other animal products.
Vegan diets eliminate all meat and any products obtained from animals.
Food allergies are common and can result in severe reactions. While people can be allergic to a range of foods, typical examples are nuts, shellfish and soy.
2. Plan in advance
You don’t want to be caught off guard with special food requests right in the middle of your event. Ask guests to specify any dietary restrictions in response to the event invitation.
This can be as simple as a questionnaire on the email invite that offers the most common choices. Guests can tick a box if they want a dairy-free, gluten-free or vegetarian meal.
It’s best to specify a deadline for RSVPs and politely note that special requests can't be accommodated during the event itself. This way, you can finalise the menu early, and rest assured that everyone is catered for.
3. Choosing the group or individual approach
It is possible to offer your guests a delicious group menu to suit most dietary requirements. For example, our hot dogs are naturally gluten-free, and we offer vegetarian hot dogs on request that are also vegan-friendly. So, there’s no need to miss out on a hot dog cart for your next corporate event!
This approach is ideal for large events where you're catering for a lot of people.
However, if your event is smaller, you might choose to offer individual meals to guests with identified food restrictions. This is especially useful for guests with food allergies, as it reduces the possibility of them accidentally ingesting a harmful ingredient. You can create a gluten-free and vegetarian version of just one dish to keep things simple and cost-effective for you.
And our top tip? It’s important to ensure your guests are happy and that individual requests are catered for. So while it’s the responsibility of your guests to inform you of their needs in advance, it is also a good idea to have some extra vegetarian and gluten-free meals on hand, just in case.
Now, if you’re serving coffee, that’s a whole other story… stocking up on dairy, soy and nut milks is a must!