Catering can often be a lot more than $30 USD per person per meal. And it’s also sometimes necessary to go with a certain catering company and meet a minimum in order to book a venue.
And—ask your lawyer/accountant—but at least in the US I think you could give attendees a certain amount of cash for meals without requiring receipting or generating taxable income. This would be pointless since you could just lower the entry fee instead -- except to the extent someone’s entry fee was already zero due to limited income and you were worried about making their attendance unaffordable by eliminating catering.
Is there a viable version of non-catering where the organizers promise nothing but also invite a bunch of food trucks to camp by the venue? Perhaps that could help at least some of the attendees have fast and affordable food options.
We’ve looked into this very briefly for EAG, and my understanding is that there aren’t many (large) venues for which this would work well. Most of our venues require us to spend a minimum amount of money on food and beverage, there often isn’t a clear location where food trucks would park, and most venues don’t let you bring in outside food into the venue (meaning that if it’s raining for example, attendees would have to eat their food truck lunches outside).
These aren’t slam down points, mostly because I’m not 100% confident how food trucks would work, and this has prompted me to investigate food trucks more deeply now, so thanks for that!
For EAG Bay Area 2023, we didn’t do dinners on the Saturday and Sunday night (to save money) and it worked well-ish because there were lots of restaurants nearby. I do think it meant that most attendees left at ~6pm and didn’t come back (whereas when we’ve provided dinner, lots of people stay until the 10pm closing time). This tells me that not providing dinner did come at some cost (reduced networking time), though I still think the decision to not provide these dinners was worth it given their potential financial cost.
Catering can often be a lot more than $30 USD per person per meal. And it’s also sometimes necessary to go with a certain catering company and meet a minimum in order to book a venue.
And—ask your lawyer/accountant—but at least in the US I think you could give attendees a certain amount of cash for meals without requiring receipting or generating taxable income. This would be pointless since you could just lower the entry fee instead -- except to the extent someone’s entry fee was already zero due to limited income and you were worried about making their attendance unaffordable by eliminating catering.
Is there a viable version of non-catering where the organizers promise nothing but also invite a bunch of food trucks to camp by the venue? Perhaps that could help at least some of the attendees have fast and affordable food options.
We’ve looked into this very briefly for EAG, and my understanding is that there aren’t many (large) venues for which this would work well. Most of our venues require us to spend a minimum amount of money on food and beverage, there often isn’t a clear location where food trucks would park, and most venues don’t let you bring in outside food into the venue (meaning that if it’s raining for example, attendees would have to eat their food truck lunches outside).
These aren’t slam down points, mostly because I’m not 100% confident how food trucks would work, and this has prompted me to investigate food trucks more deeply now, so thanks for that!
For EAG Bay Area 2023, we didn’t do dinners on the Saturday and Sunday night (to save money) and it worked well-ish because there were lots of restaurants nearby. I do think it meant that most attendees left at ~6pm and didn’t come back (whereas when we’ve provided dinner, lots of people stay until the 10pm closing time). This tells me that not providing dinner did come at some cost (reduced networking time), though I still think the decision to not provide these dinners was worth it given their potential financial cost.