How about reducing the number of catered meals while increasing support for meals outside the venue? Silly example: someone could fill a hotel room with Soylent so that everyone can grab liquid meals and go chat somewhere—sort of a “baguettes and hummus” vibe. Or as @Matt_Sharp pointed out, we could reserve nearby restaurants. No idea if these exact plans are feasible, but I can imagine similarly scrappy solutions going well if planned by actual logistics experts.
Thanks so much for your work and this information!
No problem, thanks for your thoughts here! I’ll note that in venues where we have a minimum spend, attendees aren’t allowed to bring outside food into the venue unless they have serious allergies. So if we did hand out Soylent/snacks somewhere else, they’d have to consume this on the street or something (which may be a disaster if it’s raining or cold).
Re reserving nearby restaurants — we did this at EAG Bay Area and plan to do it again in the future (we just reserved some restaurant tables but had attendees pay for their own meals). If we were to actually plan meals/do catering at multiple nearby restaurants, that would likely be a lot of work on our end and we probably wouldn’t have capacity to pull it off well.
Renting out nearby restaurants seems like plausibly a good idea, though, a) that might also be quite expensive, so I’m not sure we’d actually save on costs, and b) the logistical overhead on figuring that out could be large.
How about reducing the number of catered meals while increasing support for meals outside the venue? Silly example: someone could fill a hotel room with Soylent so that everyone can grab liquid meals and go chat somewhere—sort of a “baguettes and hummus” vibe. Or as @Matt_Sharp pointed out, we could reserve nearby restaurants. No idea if these exact plans are feasible, but I can imagine similarly scrappy solutions going well if planned by actual logistics experts.
Thanks so much for your work and this information!
No problem, thanks for your thoughts here! I’ll note that in venues where we have a minimum spend, attendees aren’t allowed to bring outside food into the venue unless they have serious allergies. So if we did hand out Soylent/snacks somewhere else, they’d have to consume this on the street or something (which may be a disaster if it’s raining or cold).
Re reserving nearby restaurants — we did this at EAG Bay Area and plan to do it again in the future (we just reserved some restaurant tables but had attendees pay for their own meals). If we were to actually plan meals/do catering at multiple nearby restaurants, that would likely be a lot of work on our end and we probably wouldn’t have capacity to pull it off well.
Renting out nearby restaurants seems like plausibly a good idea, though, a) that might also be quite expensive, so I’m not sure we’d actually save on costs, and b) the logistical overhead on figuring that out could be large.
I took ‘reserve’ to mean ‘book reservations at’, which is usually free, though may require a deposit at certain size bookings?