The quote that takes ten days

Ask a caterer where their time goes and the answer is rarely the kitchen. It is the quoting. A request arrives saying "we're having about 40 people on the 12th, what would that cost?" and it contains almost nothing you need in order to answer it.

So you call. You find out it is a lunch, not a dinner; that they want it delivered rather than served; that there are two vegetarians and someone who cannot eat shellfish; that the budget is per head and the number they had in mind is lower than yours. You write it up. They come back and ask what it would look like without the dessert, and with chicken instead of beef. You write it up again.

By the time the number is agreed, you have spent perhaps ninety minutes on a job that might not happen. In a busy month you do that fifteen times and win six.

The part that is genuinely irreducible

Some of this is the job. A wedding for a hundred and forty, with a marquee and a kitchen that has to be built on the day, is a conversation, and no form is going to replace it. Nobody sensible is claiming otherwise.

But a great deal of catering is not that. A drop-off lunch for an office, a tray of sandwiches and two salads, a birthday for thirty in somebody's garden — these have a small number of decisions in them, all of which the customer is perfectly capable of making on their own, and all of which currently arrive one at a time by email.

What is actually being asked for

Underneath the back and forth, the customer wants three things and wants them in this order:

A price they can put in front of somebody else. Often a manager, a partner, or a committee. Not a range. Not "starting from". A number with lines under it.

Confirmation that you can do the date. Which you know instantly and they do not.

Permission to change their mind twice. Which is the expensive part, because each change costs you another round.

Why the wait costs more than it looks

The obvious cost is your evening. The one that actually hurts is that people buy from whoever answers first. Somebody planning an event is usually asking two or three kitchens at once, and the one who comes back with a number on Tuesday night is competing against nobody, while the one who comes back on Friday is competing against a decision that has already been made.

This is not a claim about catering specifically — it is what happens whenever a buyer with a deadline asks several suppliers the same question. But catering has an unusually long gap between the question and the answer, which makes it unusually exposed.

What to do about it without becoming a fast-food menu

The instinct is to resist, because pricing is where the margin lives and putting it in public feels like handing it to competitors. Two things are worth separating there.

First, your prices are already public in every practical sense. Anyone who wants them sends an enquiry from a free email address and has them in a day.

Second, and more usefully: you do not have to publish a price to remove the delay. You can let somebody build exactly what they want — the package, the headcount, the swaps, the extras, the date, the address — and decide separately whether they see the total straight away, whether it comes back to them as a quote you have approved, or whether they can pay for it there and then. All three remove the two phone calls. Only one of them puts a number on the internet.

The quiet second benefit

An enquiry that arrives as "about 40 people on the 12th" is a task. The same enquiry that arrives as a built order — the menu chosen, the headcount, the allergies flagged, the address in a delivery zone you serve — is a decision. You either take it or you do not, and it takes ninety seconds instead of ninety minutes.

That difference compounds. It is the reason a kitchen doing forty events a year and a kitchen doing four hundred can be run by the same number of people.