Catering Items and Equipment List, Scaled to Your Guest Count

The list is grouped into seven blocks: cooking and fire, prep, serving and live counters, crockery, storage and transport, hygiene, and staff. Quantities follow three different drivers, and mixing them up is the commonest planning error. Crockery follows guests: 500 guests need 650 dinner plates whether the menu has six dishes or twelve. Serving gear follows dishes: twelve dishes on two lines need 24 chafing dishes, and doubling the menu doubles the chafers without adding a single plate. Cooking gear follows cooked weight, which depends on how many wet dishes you make and how much of each per guest. The workbook keeps those three drivers as separate inputs, so a change to the menu or the headcount moves only what it should.

Start with weight, not with the number of pots you own. A wet dish at 100 g per guest is 50 kg for 500 guests, and four of them make 200 kg. A 60 L degchi holds roughly 45 kg of dal or gravy once you leave room to stir, so 200 ÷ 45 is 4.4, which rounds up to 5. Rice is 150 g cooked per guest, or 75 kg, and a 100 L degchi takes about 65 kg, so that is 2 pots. Seven degchis means seven bhatti stands. A good head cook will stagger the cooking and free a burner or two, but do not plan below seven. The day you plan for six is the day the paneer gravy starts at 2 pm for a 7 pm service.

Gas is the item people guess. LPG distributors put a catering burner at about 0.8 to 1 kg an hour on high flame, and commercial cylinders are 19 kg. Seven burners for three hours at 0.9 kg is 18.9 kg. The two live counters add 2 × 4 hours × 0.8 kg = 6.4 kg, which brings you to 25.3 kg. Multiply by 1.25 for a reserve and the figure is 31.6 kg: two cylinders, with room to spare. One 19 kg cylinder lasts about 21 burner-hours (19 ÷ 0.9), so the arithmetic is never close on a 500-guest job. If the lawn is 40 km from the nearest gas agency, load a third. An empty cylinder at 8 pm is not something a phone call fixes.

Service lines are a judgement call. Most caterers open a second line somewhere between 200 and 300 guests; the sheet uses one line per 250 and lets you overwrite it. Each dish needs a chafing dish on every line, so 12 dishes on 2 lines is 24. Three chafers fit on a 6 ft buffet table, which gives 4 tables a line and 8 in total. Order two fuel cans per chafer and a serving spoon each with a quarter spare, or the paneer ends up with the dal spoon. For stewards the sheet uses the 1 per 25 to 30 guests norm: 500 ÷ 28 is 18, and one captain to every ten stewards adds 2 more.

Buy what works every week and hire what works twice a season. Degchis, bhattis, ladles, knives and everyday crockery earn their price quickly. Extra chafers, spare glasses and the 800th plate for a peak-date wedding are better hired. The test is simple: divide the purchase price by the hire fee per event, then compare that number with how many events a year the item goes out on. As an illustration only, a chafing dish bought at ₹3,600 and hired at ₹150 an event pays back after 24 events, so if it goes out 10 times a year, hire it. Use your own supplier quotes, because prices swing by city and by wedding season. The Excel sheet has a rate column and an already-own column for exactly this comparison.

Here is how a sheet-less dispatch goes wrong, as a made-up but familiar case. A caterer loads 20 chafing dishes for a 12-dish, two-line buffet that needs 24. Nobody counts, because the van looks full. On the second line four dishes sit in steel patilas on the table with no fuel underneath, and the gravy is lukewarm by the time that line opens. FSSAI Schedule 4 Part V expects hot food at 60 °C or above. The client sees it, the head steward blames loading, and loading blames a sheet that did not exist. The fix costs four chafers and one printed page, which is far cheaper than a discounted invoice.

The return count matters as much as the loading count, and it is the one that gets skipped at 1 am. The Dispatch Checklist sheet has four tick columns: loaded, at venue, returned, and short or damaged. Print it, give it to the driver, and tick it in the yard while the crew is still standing there. Breakage written against a shift the same night gets accepted, while breakage discovered three days later gets argued. Keep the sheets. After a season you will know exactly which items you under-stock, because the same lines come back short every time.