Quick Ways To Calculate Your “Minimum Guarantee” To Caterers!

Wedding food planning can get overwhelming! The menu, the number of cuisines, ensuring the items don’t overlap in multiple events, food tasting – the list is never-ending. Out of all these, the most important question that you need to answer is – what is your minimum guarantee? A minimum guarantee is a popular phenomenon in India where you commit a fixed number of guests that will come to your wedding events, come what may. If your guests exceed, you pay extra but if they drop out at the last minute, you have to pay for the minimum guarantee you committed. Now how do you calculate this? We’ve figured out a quick and easy way to do this!

Talk To Married Couples

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Getting information from prior experiences is the best way to go ahead when you are planning a wedding. Talk to married couples on how they went about planning their minimum guarantee and what was the final tally of guests. This will help you understand how short or high they went and plan accordingly.

Finalize Your Guestlist

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To arrive at a minimum guarantee you need to know the maximum amount of guests that may attend your event. For that finalizing the number of people you plan to invite is very essential. If your numbers are running in thousands, we suggest round it up to the last 100!

Have an RSVP System

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An RSVP system will help you analyse a realistic number for every event that you are planning. We understand that in India people aren’t very disciplined but taking the effort of reminding them and getting the confirmed RSVP from at least 75% of guests to calculate your minimum guarantee will sort your problem.

Check Your Wedding Dates And Venues

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Is it a weekend or a weekday wedding? Is the venue far from where your guests reside? Is it a monsoon wedding where the weather may cause people to cancel? Check how many people are travelling out of the city for this event vs how many are locally travelling? All of these factors will decide the number of people you predict will attend so keep these in mind.

Follow The Formula

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While this may not be foolproof for all weddings, it will work for most weddings

• Count everyone invited. For eg, you have invited 100 people
• Divide into definitely 'will come' and 'may come' categories - for example, out of the above 100 you invited, 60 will definitely come and 40 may come. 
• Estimate 90% of definitely will come - that is 90% of 60 people
• Estimate 70% of ‘may come’ - that would be 70% of 40 
• Add it up and give it to your caterer!
• Also, ensure the food is made for at least 15% over and above your MG

Discuss This With Your Caterer

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Wait, your work isn’t done. Once you have arrived at your minimum guarantee, have a conversation with your caterer. Tell him your MG and also how many people you may expect over and above. Ask him if he will be able to accommodate them if they arrive unannounced. If yes, what would be the charges for the same. Most catering vendors work with similar costs per plate for your minimum guarantee that you share + 15% more plates. But if it exceeds that number, they may charge more per plate, so get that clarified.  

It’s easy to let something like having minimum guarantee stress you out, but assign a family member or friend to handle the caterers on the day of the wedding so you don’t have to worry about how many puris are being fried or not!

Did this help you to come to a conclusion about your minimum guarantee?

For stress-free wedding food planning, check out a list of our excellent wedding caterers!

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