Catering Tenders – Should You Bid on Quality or Price?

It’s a dilemma facing everyone sitting down to write catering tenders. 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?

It’s a question you should have answered when you first set up your catering services company. Your inital business model should map the future for the way your catering tenders are written.

Don’t even try to sell high quality food if your business model is an affordable low cost service. 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.

However, That is a lot easier said than done when you site down to write your catering tender. A lot of this will dependant of the catering tender you are bidding for.

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.

Without sounding contrdictory, its not that easy. Schools have to be seen to offer a healty good quality menu. But they also have budgets to stick to and cant be seen to be squandering money.

How should you write your Catering Tenders? What would be the best way for your your catering business?

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. But, if you know your services aren’t the cheapest, explain that to anyone reading your catering tenders.

Maybe you only use free range eggs. Maybe your napkins are all recyclable. It could be that all your hot drinks are Fairtrade. Justify your slightly higher prices in your catering tenders while explaining why that matters.

Make sure any claims you make within your catering tender are backed up. If you only use soil association products or you are a registered distributor of fairtrade products, you need to make sure you include this in your catering tenders.

OK so lets say, you specialise in a value for money service, how would you then write your catering tenders? the secret to this is to only bid for tenders that fit within your business model. Your suceess rate will be much higher if you only write catering tenders for businesses who are looking for a low budget service.

Writing catering tenders is a difficult balancing act. To finish, just remember, regardless of whether you are writting your catering tenders based on quality of cost, they will need to demostrate that they are outstanding value for money.