Per person, per tray, per piece: five ways to price the same food

The five shapes, and who uses them:

Per person

The default for anything served: weddings, plated dinners, buffets. A price per head, usually with the package doing the work of describing what that head gets. Tiers by headcount are normal — the price per person falls as the number rises, because the fixed costs spread.

Where it gets awkward: when the package contains choices that are not equal. "Pick two mains from these five" is fine until one of the five is beef and the other four are not. The usual answer is an upcharge on the expensive one, which has to apply per person and has to be visible before the customer picks it.

Per tray

Office and drop-off catering. A half pan feeds around ten, a full pan around twenty, and the customer buys pans rather than people. Simpler to quote and much simpler to produce.

Where it gets awkward: the customer thinks in people and buys in pans, so somebody has to translate. A menu that says "half pan (feeds 8–12)" is doing that translation; one that just says "half pan" is making the customer guess, and they will guess low and complain.

Flat fee plus per person

Food trucks and anything mobile. A fixed amount to bring the unit out and staff it, then a per-head rate for the food. The flat fee is the honest expression of the fact that getting to you costs the same whether you have booked forty or seventy.

Where it gets awkward: travel. Past a certain radius the flat fee stops covering it, and a per-mile charge past a set distance is the usual fix. Which means the price depends on the address, which means the address has to be asked for early.

Per person, rising as the group shrinks

Private chefs. The inverted case: six guests cost more per head than sixteen, because the work — the menu, the shopping, the travel, the evening — is largely the same either way. It looks like a mistake in a system that assumes volume discounts, and it is not.

Where it gets awkward: in almost every piece of software, because tiers are usually written on the assumption that bigger is cheaper. A structure that cannot express a rate going up is a structure that cannot price a private chef.

Per piece

Bakeries, desserts, canapés. Priced by the item, often with a platter price that is not simply the item price times the count.

Where it gets awkward: minimums per item — you cannot order three of something that is baked in dozens — and the interaction between the piece price and the platter price, which needs to be a deliberate decision rather than an accident.

The point

These are not variations on a theme; they are five different arithmetics. A caterer often uses two or three at once — per person for the wedding menu, per tray for corporate, per piece for the dessert table — which means the question is not which shape your software supports, but whether it supports them at the same time on the same menu.