5 Questions to Ask Before Booking Corporate Event Catering

Booking corporate event catering London doesn’t work like booking your regular office lunch. You can’t just call up the first number on Google and confirm your headcount over the phone. Getting corporate catering right turns food and drink into one of the most memorable parts of your day, telling your team or clients that you care about their time and enjoyment. Get it wrong, though, and you’re taking calls about cold food or missing dietary options on the biggest day of your business’s year. 

Corporate event catering London is bigger business than ever before. Prices have been rising since 2024 thanks to soaring supplier costs, while businesses across London are reining in budgets and demanding more from their spend. They want consistency, proper dietary management, and high standards of service to match their own. 

That’s why the questions you ask before booking catering matter more than ever. Here are our five essential questions that every event organiser in London should ask before booking catering.

Before you discuss menus. Before you talk pricing. Before you even confirm they can cater your date. You need to know your caterer has a 5-star food hygiene rating from their local authority. 

Best practice across the catering industry is for any caterer chosen for an event to provide their risk assessment and official food hygiene rating document as standard. If they can't produce this information instantly, they aren't worth the risk to you or your guests. 

Owen Brothers Catering holds a 5-star food hygiene rating from Westminster City Council, and we operate a fully certified HACCP digital food safety system. You’ll see proof of both documents as soon as you enquire. You should never have to chase this information. 

You can search any food business via the FSA’s Food Hygiene Rating Scheme website at ratings.food.gov.uk. Always double-check before you book. 

Asking about dietary options will immediately separate the wheat from the chaff. Every provider will say they offer vegan options these days. But how many of them will truly handle allergies and dietary restrictions safely and accurately at a large event? 

Under UK food law, any food business must declare allergen information whenever one of the 14 major allergens is present in the food they serve. Guidance from the FSA last year also recommended that best practice now dictates written allergen information should be made available to guests at events. Simply asking staff about allergens will not suffice. 

A corporate event with 50 guests is challenging. A wedding with 100 guests is busy. Catering for 200 guests who are vegan, coeliac, halal-observing, managing nut allergies, dairy allergies, and shellfish allergies, all eating from the same station with the same serving staff, is a logistical achievement. 

Instead of asking, ‘Do you offer vegan?’, you need to know how they manage cross-contamination in the kitchen, the labelling of allergen-specific dishes during service, and ensure the food actually reaches the right people reliably every time. 

We build dietary and allergen-specific requirements into our service at every scale. Our systems for managing allergy and dietary requests from our Corporate Lunch Catering clients transfer across perfectly to events because they were designed to cope with events from day one. 

If a caterer truly has your dietary requirements covered, they will be able to explain their process to you, not just tell you, "Yes, we do vegan."

Event catering prices UK-wide have increased substantially since 2023. With businesses questioning value for money like never before, there’s a risk that you won’t just pay too much for catering. You could misread what you’re paying for in the first place. 

Okay, so you’ve booked enough food for everyone attending. But can your caterer scale their service to meet the unique demands of your event? Will their team be too big or too small to handle your venue? Does your training lunch feel like a gala dinner based on their set-up requirements? 

The variety of event formats we see in London has exploded over recent years. Corporate events no longer default to three- or four-course menus. We’re seeing more flowing menus than ever; plated canapés followed by sharing/small plate options or bowl food. Guests arrive at different times, and these formats help keep everyone fed and socially active throughout. 

So what questions should you ask to ensure your caterer can scale. Minimum headcount? External venues or offices only? Can they serve plated, buffet, working lunch, or afternoon tea formats? Do they have experience catering at your kind of event before? 

We cater at every scale from small gatherings to headcount-hitters, serving food to London’s largest companies and professional teams every week. Because we cater on weekdays to many of the same clients as event caterers, we understand how those offices work. We’ve got the standards, logistics, and timing down to a tee. 

Same team. Event or office. Corporate lunch or breakfast event catering. We can help.

While having your food late is bad, this is by far the most frequent issue we see with catering on event days. Late deliveries during scheduled breaks. Setup not completed when delegates arrive. Serving unable to flex if your programme overruns or finishes early. 

Timing is everything. And surveys of corporate event planning in 2026 show this is what experienced planners care about most. If your menu isn’t delivered on time and fresh, it doesn’t matter how nice it looks on paper. 

Simply ask. What if my event finishes early? What if it overruns? How much notice do you need for the final headcount? What if there’s a vehicle breakdown or a staff member is ill on the day? 

A good provider will be able to answer all these questions, plus have contingencies for the questions you don’t think to ask. If they can't give you clear answers now, you’ll be giving them enquiries about issues on the day. 

All our vehicles are GPS-tracked and Euro 6 compliant, so we can track progress on deliveries in real time. If there’s a delay, we’ll call you. Every team meeting we take takes account of your event schedule, not our projection. Our teams also cater film and TV productions where timing is non-negotiable and there’s no margin for error. It’s that level of precision we bring to your event day.

Since 1974, we have catered to London’s professional sector, sticking religiously to one core tenet throughout that time: deliver food that is consistently well prepared, arrives on time, and is managed effectively from enquiry to pack-down. 

Our track record speaks for itself. Ask to see our ratings, food safety system, and policy documents. We’re happy to provide them. We also run a fleet of GPS-tracked, Euro 6-compliant vehicles so we can monitor our deliveries throughout the day. Every part of our business, from kitchen to fleet, is set up with your event’s success in mind. 

We use Vegware compostable catering disposables for events with a sustainability mandate. Dietary and allergen requirements are covered as standard on every booking. 

If your business requires catering beyond just events, we also cover ongoing office catering needs and breakfast catering for early meetings and team days. 

Put simply: we are one provider. With one standard across everything your business needs to cater. 

Get a free quote today and tell us about your event. We will return to you with a personalised, itemised quote with absolutely no hidden extras.