Catering pricing and quotes 2026: read your own booking history instead of guessing

The price per guest rarely measures the food

The per-guest price is a poor measure of nearly everything except itself, and four served bookings from the material show why. One with 109 guests, no drinks through the kitchen and no venue, came to 634 kronor per guest. One with 77 guests, drinks and a marquee at 10,000 kronor, came to 830. One with 48 guests, drinks and 3,000 kronor for exclusive hire, came to 1,051. And one with 70 guests, drinks and 15,000 kronor of venue rental, came to 1,337. The food was in roughly the same territory in all four. What moved the number was whatever happened to sit inside the same sum — and how many people that sum was divided by. You have not guessed wrong; you have measured the wrong thing.

It is also why catering should be priced on its own terms rather than as an extension of the restaurant. The guest booking a table decides on the spot and pays the same evening; the catering customer asks a question weeks ahead, with a head count that has to hold, an invoice going to a company and a date on which you have already turned something else down. If you run the restaurant rather than the catering, the guide for restaurants and cafés is the one you want instead — that one is about the guest in the room, this one is about the order that gets planned.

Take out venue, staff and drinks — then the food falls into bands

Of 23 bookings handed over, 16 were usable; the rest lacked either a head count or an amount. Strip venue, staff and drinks out of those sixteen and the food sits between 125 and 651 kronor per guest. Sort the rows by ambition and you get three bands that do not overlap: simple at 125–200 kronor per guest across five bookings, mid-range at 240–299 across six, and the most expensive at 454–651 across five. Three bands, sixteen rows, no overlap. That is something you can quote from. The figure 125–1,337 never was.

A venue is a fixed cost — it does not belong in a per-guest price

This is the single biggest source of error, and it is pure arithmetic. A venue rental of 15,000 kronor is 214 kronor per guest at 70 people and 100 kronor at 150. Same room, same invoice, same evening — but folded into a per-head price, the number moves with the size of the party for reasons that have nothing to do with catering. The customer quoted 1,337 kronor per guest thinks your food is expensive. The one quoted 634 thinks it is cheap. Neither has been told anything about the food.

The same goes for the 10,000-krona marquee and the 3,000-krona exclusive hire: they are amounts, not per-guest prices, and they belong on their own lines. Then you get a food price that is comparable between bookings, and the customer sees what she is paying for — the only way out of the conversation where she compares your per-head price with someone else’s that does not contain the same things.

Drinks often cannot be costed at all — and should be quoted separately anyway

In this material only 4 of 16 rows carried a drinks figure at all, and those four ranged from 66 to 430 kronor per guest. Of nine keg bookings, not one had an amount. There is no honest way to derive a drinks price from that — and it is exactly the kind of hole where a number gets set by feel and then has to be defended without evidence. The conclusion was to lift drinks out of the range and quote them separately.

There are two reasons to do it even with perfect data. VAT is one: spirits, wine and strong beer are taxed at 25 percent, while the rest of a restaurant or catering service sits at 12. The Swedish Tax Agency is explicit that a combined price for food and drink has to be split afterwards, whereas separate prices for food and for drink create no such problem. The other is the Alcohol Act: serving alcohol requires a licence, a catering licence for private functions requires under chapter 8, section 4 that the venue be notified to and approved by the municipality for each occasion, and under chapter 8, section 21 the price of the alcohol may never fall below purchase price plus a reasonable margin. A package price covering food and drink is permitted, provided a non-alcoholic option is offered at a proportionately lower price. That is why "drinks included" is a bad idea — not because it is forbidden, but because you still have to be able to show the alcohol figure on its own, for the VAT and for the margin rule.

VAT from 1 April 2026: the same buffet can carry 6 or 12 percent

Since 1 April 2026 VAT on food has been cut from 12 to 6 percent, and the cut runs until 31 December 2027. Restaurant and catering services stay at 12. That sounds like a bookkeeper’s detail, but it makes your price list ambiguous: the exact same buffet can carry 6 percent when it is dropped off without support services and 12 percent when you stand there and serve it. The difference is not the food but whether enough support services are included — laying tables, serving, clearing, washing up, or the right to use a room and its furniture. The same line reappears if you start selling the food through a webshop, where the shipping takes the goods’ VAT rate too.

The line runs in more places than you would expect. Food delivered in containers the customer returns is still a supply of food. But hiring out crockery, cutlery or linen along with the delivery makes the whole thing a catering service — and the Tax Agency states explicitly that it makes no difference whether the hire is charged separately. There is also a margin gap: your ingredient purchases carry 6 percent input VAT while the service is invoiced at 12, six percentage points away from how it worked before 1 April. If your costing is older than that, it is wrong. In practice it means one thing: the price list has to say which form of delivery the price refers to, or the VAT is undefined — and "we charge 250 kronor a head" is not a price until it says whether anyone is serving them.

The quote: one line per component, and every line defensible

Once the split exists the quote almost writes itself, and it becomes a sales tool as well. A quote at 650 kronor a head can end up more expensive than one at 800 if it leaves out staff, crockery and cleaning — and that asymmetry is the caterer’s biggest sales problem, because the customer only discovers the difference on the invoice. Five lines go a long way:

1. Food, per guest. The only figure that genuinely scales with the party. State the band the ambition level lands in, plus one sentence on what decides where inside it this particular order sits.
2. Venue, marquee and exclusive hire — a fixed amount on its own line. Never spread per guest. This is the line that otherwise makes your food look like a completely different product depending on whether the party is 70 or 150.
3. Staff, per hour with a minimum charge. Staff is a time item, not a mark-up: travel, setting up, serving and clearing are hours somebody actually stands there. Catering counts as restaurant activity under the Tax Procedures Act and therefore falls under the staff-ledger requirement — with an exemption for sole traders and close companies where only you, your spouse or children under 16 work (chapter 39, section 11). If the business is mainly something other than a restaurant, it does not count as restaurant activity at all (chapter 39, section 2).
4. Transport and form of delivery. This line costs more than it looks, because it decides the VAT rate and the cold chain at the same time. The Food Agency’s reference values — guidance, not binding rules — put hot holding around 60 degrees and cooling from 60 to 8 degrees within six hours. That is equipment and driving time, not an arbitrary delivery fee.
5. Drinks — a separate quote, never folded in. Its own line, its own VAT rate, its own licence. Plus one sentence on what applies if the customer wants to bring their own, because that question comes up every time.

One more rule, harder than it sounds: every field the customer fills in has to affect the outcome. In this project I removed a field asking how many courses were wanted, because the column was empty on all sixteen rows — the answer could not move a single krona, while the form implied that it could. A field that does not count is not neutral. It is a promise you do not keep. What the calculation looks like once automated — enquiry in, draft in your inbox, never a send without you clicking — has a guide of its own on quote automation.

The enquiry has to be quotable on arrival — otherwise it becomes five emails

"What does it cost for 50 people?" is not an enquiry, it is the start of one. Without head count, date, location, form of delivery and allergies you cannot cost it, so the reply becomes a question, and then another — while the customer asks three other kitchens at the same time. A form that asks those five things in the right order means you wake up to an enquiry you can price that morning rather than to a thread. The same construction that works for cleaning and moving companies, where the equivalent is number of rooms, floor and lift; here it is head count, date, location, service format and dietary requirements.

The allergy question is not a courtesy either but a requirement. For food sold unpackaged, information about the fourteen allergens is the only mandatory item under the EU food information regulation — but it is mandatory without exception. The rules also give you a shortcut made for catering: under section 10 of the Swedish Food Agency’s regulation on food information, no separate notice about how to obtain the information is needed if you have carried out an assessment recording the consumer’s allergies and intolerances in advance and the food is handed over on that basis. Capture allergies in writing at the booking stage and you have both priced the special diets and met the information requirement in the same field.

Show a range — except where you have no data. Then say so.

Whether prices belong on the site is really already settled: the customer who gets no number at all moves on to whoever answered. But it should appear as a band with a sentence on what moves you inside it — not as a lone "from" price, which creates exactly the follow-up question you wanted to avoid. I landed on the same conclusion in a completely different trade where the price is never a fixed figure, and the reasoning with all the objections is in the guide on publishing prices online.

And where the data is missing, say that it is missing. The buffet had two rows in this material. Two rows are both ends of a range and nothing in between — the stretch is simply unmeasured, and putting a band across it would mean inventing three quarters of the answer. The honest line on the site becomes "this one I cost by hand", and that sentence costs you nothing. The customer given a narrow invented range and then a very different final sum has not received a better answer — she has received a worse one, with a bill at the end of it.

The cancellation clause: what actually holds

The Swedish Consumer Services Act lists work on movable property, work on real property and storage — catering is not in that list, so the act does not apply directly. The National Board for Consumer Disputes has nonetheless heard adjacent cases and reasoned as follows: an unregulated consumer service can be assessed by analogy with the act, the trader may in principle write his own terms, but those terms are tested against section 36 of the Contracts Act and the act’s cancellation rules become the benchmark for what is balanced. "Binding order, no refund" is therefore no protection. A predetermined fee, known at the time of ordering and stepped by how close to delivery the cancellation falls, is.

With two caveats worth stating plainly. First: the burden of proof is on you. In the decision I am leaning on, the trader lost precisely because it could show no costs or losses at all — ingredients bought, staff booked and paid, work turned down for the same date. Second: I have found no published board decision dealing specifically with catering, function bookings or weddings, so the reasoning above is closely analogous but not a catering ruling — do not claim otherwise to a customer. With business customers it is a different world again: the board only hears consumer disputes, and against a company the contract you signed is what applies.

Where this sits in the whole picture

Pricing is half the job; the other half is the enquiry reaching you at all. Silence on the phone costs more here than in most trades — a missed call about 80 covers for a company party is not a lost haircut, it is a single deal worth tens of thousands of kronor, and it usually lands mid-delivery when nobody can answer. What can be done about that is in the guide on missed calls. Bear in mind too that you run two businesses out of one kitchen: the wedding is the one-off, the office lunch is a subscription in disguise, and they should be priced and sold differently — the same split I have written about for cleaning and moving companies. But start with the history. Sixteen rows in a spreadsheet were enough here to turn a gut feeling into three bands, a fixed venue line and an honest "that one I cost by hand" — and it took an afternoon.