Charity Event Catering Report: Logistics Evaluation

1. Introduction

To plan, prepare and perform/carry out for an event is sometimes laborious, hard and demanding. To successfully carry out the whole plan for an event, the team has to have the same purpose and the same goal. In this case, as students from the Volume and External Catering Management course we undertook the name Floresta as our organization name to successfully prepare, setup and execute a charity event for Kaibosh in their facility on the 25th of May. The students then, is divided into teams which will be responsible for different things such as logistics, food and beverage, decorations and marketing. Those teams will be led by the original Floresta members that acts as a leader to monitor and delegate tasks to their members, a person from the original member (Mickey) is also appointed to be the manager or the one that oversees the whole teams and he is in charge of reporting and gathering up all the information from those groups. In this report, there will be sub-sections that talks about the logistics, sequence of events and issues that we as a team face during the planning, interpretation of the significance of the events, the outcomes of the decisions made, leadership, followership skills and management structures, customer interaction and feedback, overall evaluation of the event and lastly self-reflection. There will be conclusions made in the end to summarize the key points of the report and recommendations made so that in the future if we were going to create a similar event we will perform better and minimalize our mistakes.

2. Findings and analysis

2.1 Logistics evaluation, sequence of events and issues

One of the most important part of planning for an event is the logistics. According to Partridge (2011), “when the supply chain goes wrong, everything starting from the food safety to supply, consumer satisfaction and management cost is compromised”. Talking about logistics for the charity event, we will start by constructing our ordering list. Our ordering list consists of food and beverage ingredients and equipment.

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The most important part in ordering is to know how many numbers you are catering for and to make a list of the items you need and make sure to double check it with the other teams such as the F&B team needs to work with the logistics team to discuss the equipment they need for transporting the food and reheating the food on site, the decoration team also needs to work with the logistics to discuss about their decorations/the items they need to transport before the event day/on the event day itself. For purchasing and inventory control we try to minimalize and save as much profit/donation as we can by only purchasing/hiring what we need. Mainly, the logistics and F&B team is in charge of the purchasing and inventory control, they gather up information from the ordering list. For logistics as they are in charge of equipment, they try to contact companies that can hire equipment for 1 day such as Hiremaster. For the F&B team we try to create a list of ingredients and the total amount needed and send the list to Tia who is in charge of ordering ingredients in LCB. For our equipment, we have created a list and send it to the logistics team so they can know what to hire and what they can get from school for free. In terms of portion control and yield for food and beverage, we only made enough for 30 people as we try to minimalize our food waste, however for the mains we ended up making around 15-20% more because it is an option and we have to provide extra portions for the vegetarian and non-vegetarian options as the consumers will choose their mains on the spot. When planning about this event, as a whole class our concern is always to gain as much profit as we can get so we can increase the donations to Kaibosh. We ended up with some ideas on how to increase our profitability such as by selling booklets and creating a silent auction from the paintings. At the end of the day, our goal for Floresta is to promote sustainability, by minimalizing wastage and reusing ingredients whenever we can and gathering up stuffs from the nature (woods, etc.) and to raise awareness to the local community in Wellington about Kaibosh and what they provide to the community.

In terms of operational procedures every team has their own timeline and tasks written down, it is a detailed timeline and mentions the individual that is in charge of doing it. The teams will list their timeline starting from the event day, going backwards to make sure everything is on time. They also create a risk register plan to specify the risk level and the solutions on how to overcome those risks. Every team also creates an operational plan that mentions how things will work on the preparation day and on the event day so that everyone knows what to do and is efficient, because time is essential for us. For the F&B team we have divided them into different groups that is responsible for different sections (canapé, mains, etc.) and for each sections there is a leader that is appointed. The leaders from each group then creates a work flow so that their team members understand what to do and what technique is required when doing it. As we are still students, some of the techniques that we listed might not be the right technique however thanks to the guidance of our lecturers (Chef Evan and Anita) we ended up using the right technique for preparing the food such as when we were doing the bavarois Chef Evan showed us the right technique such as “folding and cutting” the mixture so that the end result would be perfect and the texture of the bavarois will be correct.