FEATURE: IN HOUSE CATERING

To cater or not to cater, that is the question

Faced with the challenges and unpredictability of outsourced catering, is it time to bring your F&B back in-house?

-By Grant Jones.

IN THE CURRENT hospitality climate, the worst thing you can do for your club is to do nothing. With members flooding back through doors, and many clubs still operating at half speed, now is the time to start making decisions, if you haven’t already. That includes the option of bringing F&B back in-house as many caterers struggle to make ends meet given the spiralling costs of labour, transport, produce and utilities.

Club managers also need to react faster to food trends and break the perceived mould of clubs pushing out discounted roasts and steaks, says Matt Dagg, former chef and the designer of Club Managers’ Association Australia’s Catering for Non-Catering Managers course. So cement your relationship with your existing customers and ask them what they want, not what the chairman’s favourite dish is! Also, look at what’s on trend outside your club.

Member services manager Dagg ran several successful catering courses in 2022 and is now looking to build on the back of that success by offering a range of similar programs next year.

We just have to break the mould of food courts in clubs and contract catering which is pushing out roasts and steaks.

-Matt Dagg, former chef and CMAA course designer

“If you know nothing about it [catering], if you apply what’s taught then you are going to be miles in front than if you don’t apply with it,” says Dagg, a former chef and F&B and operations manager who has run venues in RSLs, thoroughbred racing and surf life-saving sectors across NSW, Victoria and Queensland. “You have to apply all the learnings and run with it.”

Dagg points out to clubs that they need to address the ‘PODs’, the ‘POPs’ and the ‘POOs’, or Points Of Difference, Points Of Parity and Points of Ordinary, the latter of which isn’t something to boast about. While he says gaming is the “engine room”, patrons will come back for the hospitality.

“It all comes back to the food, wine and the service that you offer. Food is going to be the main reason for foot traffic and visitation for now and ongoing,” he says.

“And clubs shouldn’t be afraid to charge the right price for the right food. These $5 meals are just a race to the bottom. Charge what you need to, and don’t be afraid of putting a meal out there for $32.

Chef Luca Ciano checks out the SMEG equipment at Fine Food Australia in Melbourne.

“If it’s a value-for-money proposition and it’s fresh and good, don’t be afraid to back yourself!”

As this year’s recent Fine Food expo in Melbourne showcased, labour-saving devices are a godsend to clubs bring catering back in-house.

SMEG’s national foodservice manager Davide Zavaroni said there had been significant demand from customers to take the labour and guesswork out of using often complicated equipment at hospitality venues that are now experiencing a high turnover of chefs.

SMEG’s Galileo Professional oven is designed for catering and features patented technologies, in particular, a Thermofunnel cavity (a unique cone shape cavity) and SteamArt technology (internal boiler positioned directly into the cavity, able to generate saturated steam at low temperature). There is also a night function for low and slow cooking, a 4-points core probe, a 7-inch touch screen and USB port for updating and loading of new recipes.

“We invested a lot of time and effort in making sure the product is simple, intuitive and user friendly; able to deliver consistent results, day after day, with different chefs in the kitchen,” Zavaroni says.

But in the hospitality race, clubs are up against pubs, and pubs react very quickly to a new food trend, such as the rise of new ovens, smokers and Spanish chargrills, says Dagg.

“Unfortunately, clubs are a slow-moving beast and if a GM sees a great piece of equipment at an expo, by the time he’s gone to the chairman and it’s been approved by the board, the pub down the road will have introduced the trend into their menu months ago.

“Clubs have got to react quicker to food trends,” he says. “We just have to break the mould of food courts in clubs and contract catering which is pushing out roasts and steaks.”

The CMAA is soon to announce a range of courses for 2023.

Check their website for details cmaa.asn.au

Plant-based vs animal protein

In the food stakes, plant-based menus have been pushing into the club space for a while now, with ready-made products such as frozen felafel and burgers meeting both dietary requirements and food preference demands, and also adding labour-saving to their hit-list.

Delving into that market is former Merivale chef Kade Cohen whose Made By Kade Shroomi Burger was recently awarded Gold and Champion of the Specialty Food category at the recent Sydney Royal Fine Foods awards 2022.

“Our best customers are the ones that think they could do it themselves – make everything in-house,” says Cohen who supplies clubs, including Panthers and Wenty Leagues in Sydney’s west.

“I’m a big advocate for making things in-house. Most of the kitchens I’ve worked in were ‘everything from scratch’. But I also believe – especially when catering for venues which churn numbers i.e. clubs – that if you ask yourself honestly, ‘Can I make this better than these guys do?’ and the answer is ‘No’, use that product. Enhance it. Make it different. Pair it intelligently with cool flavour combos and move on.

“That will, in turn, free up some bandwidth to focus on other areas of your menu that you can probably afford to sink more prep time and mental energy into.”

A pork katsu sandwich.

While plant-based menus have yet to hit the great heights predicted, clubbies still like to tuck into a bit of real meat protein.

Pork is on menus at more than two in three cases where food service meals are purchased according to Australian Pork. But at clubs and RSLs pork menu item sales were almost 10 per cent above the average food service menu for winter 2022.

Convenience food and casual dining is also key, with the latest figures from 2021 revealing the largest gain in Club/RSL meals was for skewered kebabs which enjoyed a six per cent increase year on year.

Meanwhile, pre-made and single-serve can be great labour-saving devices given the current staffing shortages. Time pressures, hygiene and wastage are the top three reasons why 78 per cent of hospitality professionals said they were interested in using single-serve condiments.

The findings, commissioned by Birch & Waite, also found that premium quality (63%), fresh ingredients/real flavour (60%), and Australian-made (56%) are the most desirable attributes for single-serve products. And you may ask: ‘Where’s the sauce? Or dressing!’

The company has just introduced three new dressings in their premium On-The-Go range (Greek Lemon, Green Goddess, and Japanese Style) as well as their new plantbased offerings which all save on refilling bottles and wastage in self-serve sauces.

“Our customers have been adopting single-serve products because they reduce pressures on staffing, as there is no need for decanting or container sanitisation, and product wastage. These are great benefits for businesses of all sizes,” says Paul O’Brien, CEO of Birch & Waite.

Left with only one choice

As Covid started to bite and club closures took their toll, the contract caterers at Queanbeyan Kangaroos Rugby League Football Club packed their knife rolls and left.

If the club still wanted food on the table, they had no other option but to take over the catering themselves, says club general manager Leigh Kiely.

“The club had engaged contract caterers for 43 years, ever since the club opened, so this was all new to us,” Kiely explains. “We had one workday to get organised and we opened the club’s restaurant (Bistro 2620) with only two chefs. Pleasingly, this has now grown into five full-time chefs and one casual cook amongst the kitchen staff we employ.”

But they didn’t do it alone.

“To help us learn about catering management, we attended the first Catering for Non-Catering Managers course which couldn’t have come at a better time and seeing as we had to learn what to do in such a small amount of time, we immediately applied most of what we learned at the CMAA course,” Kiely says.

Queanbeyan Kangaroos Rugby League Football Club bought catering back in house with Bistro 2620.

“The management team and I now have more confidence in our food offer and our catering operation. Our customers have seen a substantial improvement in the quality and consistency of our food.

“We decided to buy quality ingredients and cook everything fresh, from making our own pizza bases to our in-house desserts. The waitstaff work to meet our expectations too and will refuse to take a meal out if they deem it’s not up to our usual high standards.

“The chefs are very proud of the quality of food that we offer, and we continue to maintain excellent monthly profits on our food helped by what we learnt in the first course about cost control, pricing strategies and the menu engineering process to maintain great GP targets.”

By taking the advanced course, the club was able to learn more about offering a point of difference, effective menu design, costing function menus, marketing food for profit and the importance of having a good wine list.

“From this, we decided to build a wine display cool room and update our wine list to incorporate mostly local wines, and this has seen a very large increase in the volume of wines that we now sell,” Kiely says.

The club has so far achieved a best net profit of 27.7 per cent (May 2022) and monthly food costs sit at around 29 per cent. Not bad for club managers who once knew nothing about F&B.

In-house need to knows

Management columnist and chef consultant Paul Rifkin’s top tips on bringing catering in-house:

“Over the past couple years, there has been a roller coaster for most catering operations. Clubs have soldiered on by being very resilient against tough odds, oftentimes with serious roadblocks.

One I have seen, more often than not, is when the contract caterer just up and leaves, this has occurred often through covid. Hastily the catering is brought back in-house, often with some staff left from the caterer.

While it solves a customer service problem with members expediently, it invariably opens up a whole range of shortcomings. Many times, resulting in a catering operation with high wages and low gross profit, creating a strain on limited financial resources.”

My top five ducks to line up first are:

1. Decide if you really want to bring your catering inhouse. Visit fellow clubs who have done this and can advise of the potential challenges that will occur. Many will report that a significant amount of management energy is spent solving catering issues, are you up to the task?

2. It is advisable to do the Club Manager’s Association course, Catering for Non-Catering Managers. This will give an insight into what it should look like, the knowledge gained will open your eyes to what catering is.

3. Take control of Food Safety from the get-go. Don’t let a chef tell you they know what they are doing, only to later say “I ran out of time”. Download a template of the Food Safety Plan from your state health website and see what a food safety plan actually entails, how the processes are recorded and verified. Many verification activities like fridge monitoring, cleaning rosters, staff training etc can be completed with digital systems.

4. Control the food! Consider implementing digital ordering, recipe and stocktake systems to ensure total control of the costings. Recipes must be linked to daily pricing to give current food costs.

5. Menus should be agile enough to change pricing as big fluctuations occur in produce. Be very mindful of how large a menu is, more items will result in more prep and wages. If items don’t sell, it will also result in wastage, with those menu items being costly as the wages to prep and then food cost to throw out.