Off-Premise Catering Management, 3rd Edition
by Chris Thomas and Bill Hansen
Wiley textbook on catering away from a fixed kitchen: menu feasibility, equipment and transport, packing lists, on-site setup, staffing ratios, service timing, pricing, contracts and sanitation. The standard reference on off-site event logistics.
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More resources on Catering Coordination
hospitalitynet.org
Hospitality Net is a leading online source for hospitality industry news, analysis, and insights across hotel management, events, technology, and marketing. The site features daily news, features, expert opinions, case studies, and industry resources for venue and hospitality professionals.
Food for Fifty, 14th Edition
Reference of tested recipes standardized to fifty portions, in print since 1937. Includes scaling tables, equivalent weights and measures, ingredient substitutions, quantity purchasing amounts, serving-size charts and production timing for institutional and banquet volumes. Answers the questions of how much of what, for how many, prepared in what order.
Basic Kitchen and Food Service Management
Open-licensed apprenticeship textbook covering the trade math behind quantity cooking: recipe conversion and scaling, yield testing, cooking loss tests, portion costing, purchasing and inventory procedures, and labour productivity. Free in HTML, PDF and EPUB. The single best free answer to 'how do I scale a recipe from 8 to 400 and know what to buy?' Yield testing and cooking loss tests are exactly the arithmetic that separates a caterer who runs out of food from one who doesn't, and almost no free catering content teaches them.
Managing Food Safety: A Manual for the Voluntary Use of HACCP Principles for Operators of Food Service and Retail Establishments
FDA's operator-facing manual for building a HACCP food safety management system. Covers hazard analysis, critical control points, monitoring, corrective actions and record keeping, with worksheets and process flow examples for cook-chill, hot holding and transport. This is the mental-model half of food safety: instead of a rules list, it teaches process-flow thinking (no-cook, same-day cook-serve, complex multi-step) and where control points fall.
FDA Food Code 2022
The FDA model retail food regulation that most US states adopt in some form. Chapter 3 governs time and temperature control, cooling, reheating, transport, and off-site service — the rules inspectors apply to catered events. Everything a caterer gets shut down for — cold-holding failures, bare-hand contact, inadequate cooling of large-batch product, transport temperatures — is specified here.
ehl.edu
EHL.edu is the official site of the École hôtelière de Lausanne, offering information on hospitality and venue management education, including degree programs, short courses, and faculty. It also features industry insights, research, and admissions resources for aspiring venue managers.