Five planning decisions that decide turnout at a corporate holiday lunch, from a Bay Area caterer.
Photo: LemonAd Media
If an office holiday lunch falls a bit flat, the catering usually is not why. It comes down to four or five small things decided weeks earlier, none of which felt like a decision at the time: the date, the start time, the headcount, and where everyone was meant to stand while holding a plate.
We cater a lot of these around San Jose, Santa Clara and the wider Peninsula, and we have a soft spot for the person organizing them, because it is almost never their actual job. So here is what we would think about first, in the order that tends to matter. None of it is complicated, and most of it takes about ten minutes if you do it early.
December fills from the outside in. The first week is quiet, the middle two weeks are where everybody lands, and by the time most teams start planning, the Thursdays and Fridays anyone actually wants have gone.
Two useful things follow. First, if you have even a rough date in mind, hold it now. It costs nothing to be early and quite a lot to be late. Second, it is worth asking whether it has to be December at all. An early December lunch, or one in Thanksgiving week, competes with far fewer calendars and often goes down better, because people are not yet running on fumes.
If you are already later than you meant to be, it is not necessarily lost. Two weeks is a fair general guide for a full-service holiday party, provided the date is still open. A drop-off lunch or an appetizer spread can often go on 72 hours’ notice, subject to availability, and with a shorter list to choose from. What earlier buys you is room to choose: menu, rentals, staffing and the best available pricing all get harder to secure the closer you get.
This is the one we would most want anyone to take away. A lunch at 1:00 may lose people, because by then a good part of the room has quietly eaten rather than wait. Move it to 11:30 and you catch a team that is still working, and they come as a group.
Somewhere around noon is usually the sweet spot. The more interesting question is what you want the food to do at that hour. If your team cannot all step away at once, something they can graze on across a longer window works far better. If you want everyone sitting down together, that needs a real block in the calendar, and it helps enormously if someone senior leaves their desk first, because that is usually the signal everyone else is waiting for.
There are two numbers here and they are almost never the same: who is invited, and who will actually be in the building. Hybrid working has widened that gap and made it harder to predict, and the second number is the one the food is for.
Order against confirmed attendance rather than the invite list, and put the effort into getting that number right rather than into padding it. In our experience people drop off a final count more often than they turn up unannounced, so a flat ten or fifteen percent on top is not always money well spent, and it adds to what gets thrown away.
The place we most often see an event run short is a choice between two hot dishes. Thirty guests, an even fifteen and fifteen split, and it sounds safe. Then a good number of people take some of both and one of the two runs out halfway down the line. If you are offering a choice, either order above the headcount on both, or tell us the crowd and let us weight the split for you, or both.
And if your team is split across offices or half remote that week, do mention it when you inquire, because it changes the format we would suggest as much as the quantity.
Dietary requirements sorted in advance are invisible, which is exactly how they should be. Left to the day, they become the event: someone standing at the end of the table with nothing they can eat while everyone else is served.
The easiest fix is to ask when the invitation goes out. It gives your caterer time to build proper dishes into the menu rather than improvise a plate, and it means nobody has to announce their requirements in front of colleagues in order to get fed.
A conference room is set up to seat a meeting, not a meal. Plates need somewhere to rest, drinks need a surface that is not also holding a laptop, and a queue needs somewhere to go that is not straight through the middle of the room.
Two real examples from our own bookings, both smaller events that worked because the setup suited the space. A 15-guest executive buffet ran as breakfast and lunch in the same room across one morning, which suited a leadership group who were in session all day and could not get out of the building. A 20-guest fall harvest lunch ran as a drop-off, because the team wanted a proper seasonal meal without anyone from their side having to run it.
Both just needed someone to think about the room a week beforehand.
Once the date, the time, the numbers and the room are settled, the menu is the easy part, and it is the part we can take off your hands completely. Our seasonal holiday menus, the formats we run them in, and what is new this year are all on one page.
See our corporate holiday menus.
If the season matters to you more than the holiday itself, our fall harvest menus run on the same peak-season produce from local farms, right through November.
And if you have a date anywhere on the calendar, the genuinely useful thing to do today is hold it.
Tell us your date, your headcount and your room, and we will build your corporate holiday lunch around all three.