Transcript
Transcript is autogenerated and may contain typos, errors, omissions etc.
[00:00:00] Pricing holiday catering jobs as a personal chef can feel confusing and overwhelming. Do you charge per person? Do you triple the food cost like the big caterers say to do? Do you just kind of throw out a number that feels good and hope it sticks? Here’s the truth, guessing is the fastest way to lose money.
In this video, I’m going to show you my step-by-step pricing strategy for holiday catering so you can actually make a profit instead of walking at an event, wondering why you did all that work for nothing. Hey there, chef Shelly here. I help passionate cooks start a personal chef business so you can finally get paid to cook and do what you love on your own term.
Today I’m going to walk you through exactly how to price holiday catering jobs without trying to compete with big caterers, without complicated formulas, and without undercharging yourself and stick around because at the end I’ll also give you my bonus tips to make sure you [00:01:00] never walk out of an event thinking that was not worth it.
Number one rule. Don’t ever. Price off the top of your head. I speak from experience. I used to do this all the time. Someone would be talking to you and they’d find out I was a personal chef and they’d be like, oh, we might be doing a holiday party or a dinner. How much do you charge for blank? And I would just blurt out a number.
Every time I did this though, I ended up underpricing and losing money. Instead, do the work upfront. Price some sample menus ahead of time so that you know what a four course dinner seated plated for eight people is a sample buffet for 20, a cocktail party for 12. You need to know exactly the sample menu, what it costs you in food, and how much time you estimate it’ll take you.
The next thing is you [00:02:00] are not a big catering company with a huge commercial kitchen buying cheap food from Cisco paying minimum wage staff to do all the work. So you can’t and shouldn’t try to compete with someone who’s charging $10 a head for a buffet of Mexican food for a hundred people. That is not the business model.
You are a personal chef. You are offering small, intimate events in someone’s home. That is a premium experience and it should be priced like one. So let’s talk about the three X pricing model. You may have heard that when catering, they get, they just triple the food costs, right? It’s in theory, a third for overhead, a third for food, and a third for profit.
Sounds simple, right? Well, for personal chefs that falls apart fast. Let’s say you’re doing a four course dinner for four people. Uh, your [00:03:00] ingredients end up costing you $106. Well, if you triple that, you’d be charging $318, but here’s the problem. What if that dinner takes you 10 hours of time between planning with the client and then you are planning and paperwork and you’re shopping, all the prep work, the actual event time where you’re preparing and serving, and then the cleaning time after your travel time to and from.
Right? So $318 minus 106 leaves, $212. So is. $200 worth 10 hours of your time on a Saturday night maybe. But maybe not. And if the menu is filet mignon, when you’re including food costs like that and just tripling it, the food cost is a lot higher. But if you’re doing something like homemade pasta, your food cost would be way lower, but your labor is way heavier.
Food cost times three doesn’t really [00:04:00] account for you. The personal chef and the type of ex. Experience that we provide Instead, what you need to do is a true cost strategy. It’s a little bit more fiddling with the numbers on the upfront, but it makes sure that you never walk out of an event thinking that you completely wasted your time.
Here’s what a true cost strategy. Add up the real food costs a hundred percent, including things that you have to buy that you’re not going to use all of, like, maybe you need two lemon slices for a garnish, but you’re going to have to buy one whole lemon, right? Or you’re going to use half a jar of something, but you have to buy the full jar.
So add up. All the food costs, including things that would come out of your pantry, dry goods. Then you need to add up all your time, the time, going back and forth with the client, the time doing all the planning and paperwork, the shopping, the travel, the [00:05:00] setup and prep, the cooking, the serving, the cleanup, the travel time.
All that is your time. Then think about any extras. Are they you having to coordinate rentals or anything like that? Are there, are you going to have to have someone help you, like a friend or family member? All those things that are true costs, but also look at the menu’s perceived value. This is those things that three X doesn’t take into account.
A beef tenderloin dinner has a higher perceived value than barbecue chicken, even though the labor might be similar for you and the food costs are different. And don’t forget things like, is it a holiday? Is it a Sunday? Is travel time really long? All these other things add up. When you do this, you know exactly what the event costs you in time and hard costs like the food and [00:06:00] also the experience that you’re providing.
Then set a price that makes it worth it, not just for the client. But for you, if it’s not worth it for $200 for you to do an event that’s going to take you 10 hours, I want you to know that upfront instead of figuring it out after you already did one. Right? So here’s the bonus , price out sample menus.
Don’t wait to do it until clients ask. You set up menus for the events you want to do. Do you want to do seated multi-course dinners? Do you want to do buffets? Do you want to do cocktail parties with past hor d’oeuvres and how many people, and then come up with. Menus, decide what you’d charge for a two person romantic dinner.
If you want to do those, decide what you’ll charge For a six person seated multi-course dinner party, decide what you’ll charge for a 15 person buffet. Do it now while you’re calm. Then when a [00:07:00] client asks, you’re not scrambling. You already know what makes sense. This one habit takes away. All the stress of trying to price on the spot.
Now that doesn’t mean that a client can’t have what they want, but it’s a lot easier when you’re, when they say they want a multi-course dinner party and they’re thinking they want beef and an ice salad to show them. A menu that’s a four course seated plated dinner, even if it’s not exactly that, and then swap things out to give them a specific quote than it is to say, oh yeah, I could do that for a couple hundred dollars.
And then when you go back and price it, you can’t, and you have to go back and have that conversation. No fun. So those are the strategies to use to price your holiday caterings as a personal chef, never guesstimate. Don’t try to compete with big caterers. Don’t ever use the three times food cost formula.
Do use a true cost strategy that covers your time, the food, and the perceived value of [00:08:00] the event. Price menus ahead of time so that you’re always prepared. If you found this helpful, be sure to hit subscribe because every week I share strategies to help you start and grow a personal chef business you actually love because the clients are out there and they’re hungry for what you’re cooking.
Leave A Comment