Catering Tenders – Should You Bid on Quality or Price?

Writing Catering tenders pose challenging questions right from the offset. Which is the best direction of focus for your catering tender? should I concertrate on the low costs of the service or the high quality of the food?

The answer really lies in what your selling points were when you initially set up your business. Your inital business model should map the future for the way your catering tenders are written.

If you offer cheap and cheerful services then trying to sell the high quality of your food isn’t the way to go. Equally if you only use the finest of locally sourced, organic, non-GM ingredients then competing on price in your catering tenders won’t work.

And yet it isn’t necessarily that easy to decide when you’re writing the catering tenders. This decision can be helped by that of the catering tender you are looking to win.

A few years ago if you were writing catering tenders for schools you would largely be competing on cost. Jamie Olivers School Dinners Campaign has shifted the empasis towards high quality food.

Yet even in this example the answer isn’t clear cut. Schools can’t afford to look like they provide substandard, low quality food. However in most cases they can’t afford to pay the high cost of genuinely high quality catering services.

So what‘s the solution for your catering services company? How should you pitch your catering tenders?

The answer may be to discuss value for money in your catering tenders. Obviously if you’ve priced yourself out of the market this isn’t going to mean you will win the contract. Make sure your catering tenders acknowledge that they may not be the cheapest if your know thats not your angle.

Perhaps all your produce is sourced locally. Maybe your napkins are all recyclable. Or your chocolate is fair trade. Make sure your higher prices are justified.

You may find it helps to back up your claims in your catering tenders. Are you registered as a distributor of Fairtrade products? Do you only use Soil Association certified ingredients? Then it needs to be in all your catering tenders.

And what if you are the cheap and cheerful catering services provider? How then do you pitch your catering tenders? The trick is to pick the right jobs to tender for. Focus you efforts on companies that are wanting lower cost catering tenders.

Writing catering tenders is a difficult balancing act. Just remember that whether company is looking for cheaper or higher quality food, they all want to see value for money in all of the catering tenders they read.