Catering usually enters a production budget as one number multiplied by two other numbers: cost per head, times crew, times shooting days. It is a reasonable place to start and a bad place to stop, because almost everything that makes the real figure move sits outside that multiplication. Two productions of the same size on the same schedule can differ by a third, and neither caterer is overcharging. This is where the money actually goes.
The Line Item Is Not One Number
A production catering budget has at least three parts that behave differently: the sit down meals, craft service, and everything logistical that makes both possible on your specific ground. Meals scale with people. Craft service scales with hours. Logistics scales with the location and barely notices how many people are standing on it. Collapsing all three into a single per head figure hides which one is growing, which is exactly the information a line producer needs when the schedule changes.
Crew Size Moves the Price Less Than You Expect
Going from thirty to sixty people does not double the cost, because a large part of the work is the same either way. The same recce, the same vehicles, the same setup and breakdown, the same staff on site for the first hour. What genuinely doubles is ingredients and portioning. This is why very small crews carry a high cost per head and large ones look cheap on paper: the fixed part is spread differently. If your crew number is uncertain, ask how the price behaves at forty, sixty and eighty rather than asking for one figure.
Shooting Days, Not Calendar Days
The rhythm of the schedule prices as much as the length of it. Twelve consecutive shooting days in one region let a kitchen buy, plan and staff as a block, and the per day cost falls. Twelve days scattered across six weeks in four places is a different job with the same headline, and it costs more per day for reasons that have nothing to do with food. Prep days, travel days and hold days should be named in the brief, because a caterer who assumes they are shooting days will quote something you did not ask for.
What Location Adds
Distance, access and facilities are the three multipliers nobody puts in the first email. Ninety minutes from the kitchen adds vehicle time, an earlier start and often a second run. No covered space adds equipment. No power adds equipment again. A stairwell instead of a lift adds people and time. A location with nothing nearby means every shortfall has to be carried in from the start, which raises the safety margin the kitchen builds in. None of that is padding, and all of it is invisible if you only compare menus. Our guide to location catering covers the operational side of the same questions.
Craft Service Is a Separate Line and Should Stay One
Craft service prices per person per day and it is the line most often cut first and regretted first. It scales with hours, not with meals, so a fourteen hour day costs meaningfully more to keep stocked than a ten hour day with the same crew. Keeping it as its own line makes it visible when the schedule stretches, instead of quietly eating into the meal budget. What actually belongs on that table, hour by hour, is covered in our piece on the craft service table.
Cast, Dietary Tracks, and Individually Packed Meals
Three things reliably add cost and are worth every dinar when they are genuinely needed. Separate cast requirements, because they are individual rather than collective. Multiple dietary tracks, because each one is a parallel production line in the kitchen and a separate labelling discipline. Individually packed meals, because packing sixty portions by hand is an hour of labour that serving from a line does not require. Ask for these to be priced as options so you can see what each one costs and decide, rather than finding them baked into a package.
"The most expensive meal on a production is the one that arrives late. Everything after it is paid for in shooting time."
The Real Cost of a Late or Cold Meal
A production hour has a price, and it is far higher than the difference between two catering quotes. A meal break that starts twenty minutes late and runs twenty minutes long costs the production a setup. A crew eating cold food on a wet exterior at hour nine does not work at the same speed afterwards, and nobody writes that down anywhere. When people compare catering offers, this is the number missing from the spreadsheet, and it is usually larger than the saving that motivated the comparison.
How to Ask for a Quote You Can Actually Compare
Send every caterer the same brief: crew numbers by department including extras, the shooting schedule with locations, the number of meals per day, expected craft service hours, dietary requirements in numbers, and the access notes. Then ask each of them to return the price split into meals, craft service, and logistics, with staff, equipment, delivery and VAT stated explicitly. Offers built on the same brief and split the same way can be compared in five minutes. Offers that arrive as one number per head cannot be compared at all, only guessed at. The same principle applied to office catering is in our piece on price per person.
Where Productions Genuinely Save Money
Real savings come from the schedule rather than the menu. Consecutive days in one region, an honest headcount confirmed the day before rather than an inflated one, meal breaks placed where they were planned, a single point of contact instead of four people phoning the kitchen, and menus built around what is in season here in August instead of what has to be imported. Cutting portion size or dropping craft service saves less and costs more, because both come straight back as time.
The Bottom Line
Budget catering by shooting day, split into meals, craft service and logistics, and price the things that actually move: location, hours, dietary tracks and how the days are grouped. If you want a real figure for your production rather than a range from an article, send us the schedule and the crew list and we will build it line by line.
