How To Change Your Food Catering Strategy During the Coronavirus Outbreak?

Every caterer is facing major cancellations at the moment due to COVID-19, as all over the world major celebrations like weddings, corporate events and birthday parties are being cancelled. This means that while others have to celebrate behind closed doors without their loved ones by their sides, catering companies are finding their work has dried up.

That is unless you find a way for your company to adapt and evolve in these current circumstances for your business to keep running and continue to make money. Here are three ways your catering strategy can change right now:

How Can Caterers Change the Way they Market Themselves?

Right now, many of us are missing our favourite restaurants and even some of our takeaways. Worse still, most of us are separated from our families, who we might enjoy a Sunday roast with every weekend. Particularly those delicious dinners our mums make for us.

This means that, while you might be able to get a delivery from your local chippy, people are still really craving the sort of mouth-watering homemade meals you would get from a restaurant or at a family event.

This is where a catering company can step in, as rather than catering a large event, you can instead bring those skills to creating superb homemade meals for families in the community – essentially portions of meals that can be put into the freezers to be used like a ready meal.
These food-catering meals could be of interest to many different people right now, including:

Families

Whether you’re both working from home or one of you is looking after the kids while the other works, this can be a very trying time. As kids are unable to go to nursery or school, it means that parents are now taking on home-schooling as well as their typical responsibilities.

Worse still, it can be hard to explain to kids – especially when you don’t want to cause anxiety – why they can no longer go outside to play with their friends or visit their grandparents and other family members, leading to grumpiness and unrest as you try to keep them entertained.

Add on to that the fact that going to your food shop now takes longer than normal due to social distancing, with many ingredients unavailable anyway. It’s little wonder that cooking is the last thing you want to do! Presenting yet another catch-22, as you don’t want to rely on takeaways which offer little nutritional value for your family.

This is where homemade catered meals become so valuable. They give you all the goodness and tastiness of a dinner made from scratch with little effort on your part. Better still, some delicious food is sure to lift everyone’s spirits too!

Elderly

When we have elderly parents or family members, we like to visit them with meals to make sure they have something easy to eat for dinners – particularly if you’re worried about them looking after themselves. Or, if they live far away, we make sure that they’re visiting plenty of clubs that will look after older people and regularly take them to places where they get their dinner.

By having access to a food catering service, you can make sure that your family are always getting the best in tasty meals, especially when it’s both hard and risky to get to supermarkets or local shops.

Key Workers

Key workers right now are working to their full capacity. No matter if you’re on the NHS frontline or you’re frantically trying to keep shelves stocked, it’s little wonder that you’re exhausted. So, having a street food vendor creating meals for you, it will make your life a little bit easier and give you a delicious dinner to look forward to.

Those Shielding or Isolating

If you’ve shown symptoms of Coronavirus or you’re one of the groups of people here in the UK that has been told to stay in for 12 weeks, you don’t have the option of getting to the shops and getting your food. This means you’ve been likely fighting over the very few delivery slots online.

This is where food catering becomes priceless, as it takes away all the worry of how you’re going to get food and instead gives you dinners that are tastier than you might have been able to make at home anyway!

This goes to show, that catering right now can be vital to certain groups of people. The only problem is, with social distancing in effect, how do you get your food out to people?

Food Delivery Service for Families

If you’re thinking about food catering during this lockdown, you’re going to need to think about delivery – especially when so many people are trying to limit time outdoors. So, before you commit to catering, work out when and how you will deliver to people and how wide your delivery radius will be.

For instance, if you plan to deliver across a large city or several small towns, you might want to commit to certain areas on specific days and give yourself plenty of time to get your food out. As the last thing you want is to be overrun with deliveries from dawn to dusk.
Also, remember to implement precautions like leaving the food package at the door, knocking and keeping a safe distance while waiting for your customers to answer the door.

Click and Collect

Rather than delivery – or as well if you wish to use by the biggest market possible – you could offer click and collect. Here your customers can place their catering order online and you can give them an allotted time to collect.
Just make sure that only one person is on your premises at any one time. Or, even better, you could bring their order out to their car for them.

Of course, not all food street vendors have the capability to offer home food catering at the moment, which can make for a worrying time. However, it’s important to remember that people are being incredibly generous at the moment and are looking to protect their local businesses.

So, you may wish to offer pre-paid vouchers, where your customers can pledge to order a meal from you in the future. They’ll pay for that meal now and you’ll give them a voucher that they can redeem for their meal when social distancing has been lifted. Which can help you pay the bills in the meantime!

This is a strange and difficult time for all but we need to be versatile and think outside the box to keep moving forward. These are just some ideas of ways to keep your business running successfully while protecting both yourself and your customers. If we are careful and keep others health in the forefront of our minds, we will return to normal life soon enough and we can all get out and serve our delicious dishes to craving customers, which is what we have been looking forward to, isn’t it?