Booking location catering can happen surprisingly early in a production, often while plenty of other details are still moving.
You might not have final crew numbers. Locations may still be changing. Call times aren’t locked and dietary information is still being collected.
That’s normal.
A good location caterer doesn’t need every answer immediately. What we do need is enough information to start asking the right questions.
One of the first things we want to understand isn’t what’s for lunch.
It’s what the day looks like.
Where are you filming? What are the expected call and meal times? How many people are we roughly feeding? Are we catering from a unit base, delivering to set or moving between locations?
Those details determine far more about the catering than choosing between two dishes on a sample menu.
We’ve worked on productions where catering could operate from an established base and others where meals needed to be individually boxed and transported to where the crew were working.
Both require completely different planning.
Final numbers are rarely final until surprisingly close to the day.
We’ve experienced crew figures changing the evening before service, so we understand that production teams don’t always have the definitive answer we’d all ideally like.
But there is a big difference between an estimate that continues to be updated and having no meaningful forecast at all.
Crew numbers influence ordering, preparation, staffing and ultimately how much food needs to be ready.
If you’re expecting approximately 100 people, tell us 100. If you then discover it’s 110, tell us that too.
Communication gives us the opportunity to adapt.
This is one of the easiest things to overlook when discussing catering.
Where can the kitchen operate? What access is available? Is there suitable parking? Are there power and water facilities? How far is the catering area from where the crew will actually be eating?
We’ve catered in plenty of situations where the answer isn’t as straightforward as “park the kitchen there.”
Knowing the practical limitations beforehand allows us to plan around them rather than discover them at breakfast.
We don’t want dietary requirements added to the bottom of a menu after everything else has been decided.
We’d rather know them while we’re planning.
That doesn’t mean we need every name immediately. Early information about the likely dietary mix already helps.
If we know there are significant vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free or other requirements within a crew, we can design the menu with those people in mind rather than trying to create replacements afterwards.
Nobody should feel as though they’re eating the alternative meal.
They should just be eating lunch.
Film schedules move. That’s hardly breaking news.
But an expected service time still gives the kitchen something to work towards.
Location catering involves working backwards: service time determines cooking time, which determines preparation, which affects staffing and when the kitchen needs to be operational.
And when production timings change, tell us.
We can deal with changing information far more effectively than missing information.
This is probably the most important point.
Productions sometimes approach caterers believing they need a completely finished brief before starting the conversation.
You don’t.
An approximate crew size, dates, location, expected service requirements and a rough idea of timings are enough to begin.
From there, we can help identify the other information we’ll need.
Rhubarb Rhubarb Catering provides chef-led location catering for TV and film productions across the UK. We work with production teams to build the catering around the realities of their shoot rather than expecting the shoot to work around us.
If you’ve got dates in the diary but everything else is still taking shape, that’s absolutely fine.
It’s enough to start a conversation.
Got dates, a rough location and an idea of crew size? That’s enough for us to start. Call us on 07425 221753 or send the details through our contact page and we’ll come back to you.
