If you are organizing an event, food catering will surely be on your planning agenda. How much budget have you allocated for food catering? If you intend to hire a food catering company, you need to make sure that the cost of hiring is within your allocated budget.

But instead of sticking within your allocated budget, you should try your best to cut down your catering cost. Basically, there are 3 things that you can do to reduce your catering cost and let us go through each one of them now.

The first thing that you need to do is to plan and prepare your event early. Some food caterers may purposely raise their prices if they know that you need their services urgently. So, this will cause you to spend more money than you intend to. So, you should source them out at least 2 - 3 weeks before your actual event starts. This will give you ample time to compare the different proposals and prices presented to you.

Next, if you intend to cut down your catering cost, you should consider not offering alcoholic drinks during your event. Alcoholic drink is always the biggest expenses in any event. By not serving alcoholic drink, you can really reduce your overall catering cost. Without alcoholic drink, you can also ensure that on one get drunk during your event.

Last but not least, you should calculate the number of people who will turn up for your event. You should take note that there will always be around 5 to 10 percent of people who will not turn up on the actual event even though they have already registered for your event. There are just too many reasons why these people do not come in the end. It is something that you cannot prevent. So, make sure that you take the 5 to 10 percent of people into consideration and not over-order the amount of food needed. Have someone to confirm the attendees before your event. Once you get the final estimated number, call up your caterer and ask him or her to adjust the number of plates that you are going to pay for accordingly.

The type of food that you order for your event also directly affects your overall catering cost. Therefore, you should always choose something that is pleasant to your guests, while still keeping the budget within reasonable range.

With proper planning and preparation, you should have no problem eliminating at least 20% off your initial catering budget.