Catering Van Business

5 Steps to Catering Van Success

October 4, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

In order to achieve success in the catering van business you ultimately need to attract customers and keep them. To make your customers come back to you again and again, you need to set your prices well and serve a consistently high quality product.

With good quality food to sell, a little innovation in profiling your business and brand and with a regular loyal customer base, it is surprising how quickly brand loyalty kicks in and customers keep spending their money with you, before you know it you will be into great profits.

Here are 5 tips to get your Catering Van business going:

A Successful Catering Van requires

1. Consistently Good Food – Even though it is mentioned last, it is the first and most important part of your service. Customers like good food with good portions, using familiar ingredients. Don’t be too generous with food, apart from losing money you’ll also lose customers who are over faced or suffer from a dry cleaning bill because the mayonnaise that you put on has dripped down their suit!

2. The Right Location – To attract customers, it is necessary to find them in abundance, especially since this is a mobile food service, customers will not travel too far during their lunch breaks to find food so remote locations inside commercial zones are the perfect target.

It is a well known fact within the food retailing arena, that customers will rarely walk more than 500 yards for food during the half hour that they are allocated. Locating your catering van and finding the right businesses is one of the key factors to succeeding.

3. Customer Service – Connect with your customers from the very beginning. This allows them to come back to you while you are in their area. Customers know what they like and this really isn’t complicated, if you manage to deliver what the customer wants then this can work wonders for your business.Build loyalty with your customer base by giving away free drinks (which you have purchased below your regular price) or half price products.

4. Charming Personality – The personality of the operator is also a great influencer from the customers perspective. People are invariably attracted to sellers who have an outgoing personality and are innovative in their selling techniques. Customers are also attracted to the way a catering van is liveried because it’s also a reflection of the owners personality.

5. Customer Favourites – We all have our favourites when it comes to food, whether it’s extra mayonnaise on a chicken salad sandwich or bacon without rind on our breakfast sandwich. Every customer has a different palate and you need to be tuned in to this.

The Proper Catering Academy runs a Catering Van Training course on a weekly basis, for more details click on the link below and read through the course itinerary and the package.

Filed Under: Catering Van Business Tagged With: business, business plan, catering, catering van, catering van business, catering van business plan, catering vans, plan, van

Burger Van Pros and Cons

October 4, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

If you are thinking about starting a burger van or a hot dog stand just take time to consider the pros and cons of the business model compared to the alternatives. Of course we come from a mobile catering van background and we are asked all the time what our thoughts are with regards to owning and running a burger van.

To be really honest we don’t have first hand knowledge of this but we do know many other operators in this market who tell us that all isn’t rosey in the burger van garden. One of the advantages and success factors in owning and running a mobile catering van business is that you can move it to wherever you want. When you have a burger van or a hot dog van you are static and you have to hook it up to another van to get it to wherever your pitch is.

The beauty of owning a catering van business is that you can operate during normal working hours and move it around to try out new businesses and locations on a whim (not that we’d ever suggest that you do this on a whim, planning is everything. Burger vans are now becoming harder and harder to site, particularly in profitable locations. All of the operators that we know work together with the larger food service companies like Compass Catering or Sodexo, leaving the secondary and tertiary locations to the rest of the crowd.

These secondary locations are very difficult to secure and many local councils are very wary of new pitches especially in the static markets due to the poor stigma that has historically been associated with the food quality. That being said, in our experience we haven’t experienced any static operator that has anything but first class quality.

To become a preferred supplier to one of the larger food service companies is very difficult so the prime locations are almost all tied up, leaving the business parks, car boot sales, antiques fairs and carriageway lay byes free.

In our opinion if you are considering starting a burger van business, think twice and make life just that little bit easier…why not think about a catering van business, make life easier.

The Proper Catering Academy runs a Catering Van Training course on a weekly basis, for more details click on the link below and read through the course itinerary and the package.

Filed Under: Catering Van Business Tagged With: burger van, burgers, catering van, compass catering, hot dog, mobile food, sodexo, van, vans, vatering

Catering Vans Presentation at Lunch!

October 4, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

Catering Vans were recently a feature of the Lunch exhibition at the annual “Food On The Go” exhibition at Billingsgate Market in London on Thursday 31st September and Friday 1st October. John Worrall, MD of Proper Pasty Company and the Proper Catering Academy, delivered an overview of the Catering Van and mobile catering opportunity in todays marketplace.

There is currently a growth in interest in the mobile catering arena with more and more people wanting to start their own business and “be their own boss” and whilst this is something that we would only encourage, it is essential that new start ups approach the opportunity with an open mind.

After operating catering vans for almost 10 years now, we have experienced almost every challenge that the mobile food business has to offer, learning valuable and expensive lessons along the way.

We believe that as with all new businesses, there will be more failures than successes in this market unless someone really shows these budding entrepreneurs the ropes before they spend their savings or put their homes in jeopardy in raising the finance to get their mobile catering business off the ground.

In an effort to support new start ups, the Proper Catering Academy was created to provide a platform for catering van owners, new and old, to learn the “Proper Way”. Buying a van and making sandwiches to sell is only a fraction of the process, there are many different elements to getting it right and that is the purpose of the Proper Catering Academy.

The Academy is a mix of practical, evidential and theoretical experiences covered in a one day session in the Proper Pasty Headquarters in Sheffield, followed by an ongoing commitment to Mentor the candidates as they grow in their business. The infinite lessons that we have learned over the past ten years have been put to good use via the Academy, great business planning techiniques, wastage controls, route planning, customer service and supplier relationship management are all covered in the course materials.

John has provided many mentoring sessions historically and these have taken up a great deal of his time, these sessions have evolved into the Academy after previous attendees expressed their appreciation for the guidance and attributed their ongoing success to things that John presented to them and advised them on throughout the early stages of their business.

Businesses that were on the brink of severe decline and eventual closure have returned to John and thanked him for the guidance and invaluable advice that he has offered and those businesses are now in the process of ordering their third, fourth or fifth catering van.

The message to the audience was loud and clear, move bravely ahead and start your own business but proceed with caution and have a plan!

The Proper Catering Academy runs a Catering Van Training course on a weekly basis, for more details click on the link below and read through the course itinerary and the package.

Filed Under: Catering Van Business Tagged With: catering van, catering van training, catering vans, lunch exhibition

Basic Food Hygiene

October 3, 2010 By admin Leave a Comment

Over the years we have experienced a broad range of circumstances with regards to serving food from a catering van, it is important that you carry out your own research with your local authorities and comply where necessary. By carrying out your own investigations and staying ahead of legislation and trading laws in the catering van arena, you will be ahead of 90% of your competition.

In our experience there are many traders operating who don’t prepare food in bacterially clean kitchens, keep records of chilled foods and hot foods in transit and there are operators out there who don’t abide by sell by dates. These operators are placing their consumers at risk every time they sell a sandwich or serve up a tray of chili con carne on a jacket potato.

We use these weaknesses and service gaps to our advantage each and every day, after all which businesses out there want staff away from the office for days after consuming poorly prepared food?

By doing your homework with regards to basic food hygiene you will no doubt be ahead of your competition, this is a big tick! A test of this is if you have the courage to invite the EHO (Environmental Health Officer) to your premises and demonstrate your ability to comply with regulations, when they have completed their assessment of you and your operation, they will grade you with a Star Rating between 1-5. How many of your competitors can demonstrate a 5 Star EHO assessment? How many businesses are aware that you have the 5 star rating against all of the others who have no rating? This is a huge USP for your business and one that you should be taking advantage of.

We issue a newsletter/flyer to all of our catering van customers telling them that we have achieved a 5 star EHO score, in addition to this we also display a copy of the certificate on each of our vans. This re-enforces the fact that we operate hygienically when the customers stand in a queue at the van which in turn assures them that they can trust our preparation process.

For more information on EHO and food guidelines check the Food Standards Agency website.

Filed Under: Catering Van Business, Food Tagged With: bacteria, basic food hygiene, eho, environmental health officer, food, hygiene, hygienic, training