Planning the Event - Adding Food and Drink

For more information on how to set up Food & Drink at your venue, check out this article here. This is a guide to creating menus and items available to all events (which this article will reference!).

1. Food & Drink for an event
2. How to add Food & Drink items to an event
3. How to edit items & quantities
4. Dietary information
5. Next Steps

Food & Drink for an event

If you offer in-house catering, or have a drinks offering that is not externally catered for - you can use Hostology to manage all of this information. On Hostology you can add prices and quantity to be able to track the logistics of the event in real time. Hostology will also link dietary information of your guests through to your account, so you can see what allergens there are for each part of the day - helping your catering team know exactly what to expect, while minimising the need to chase your customers to share this information with you!

As the itinerary is the backbone of the event, food and drink is added via the food and drink page using the itinerary, so that it is matched to the correct part/time of the day. To see how to create an itinerary, check out this article here.

There are two main ways of adding food and drink to an event, this can be done either:

• Selecting Items from your pre-made Menus/Lists of items
• Adding an item "Ad-hoc" to an event

There are also two categories that food and drink comes under:

• Menus - Are a collection of individual items. Menus will group together multiple individual items, but only show the total "Menu price" to your customers. This can be a great way for catering options such as set menus, or "Per Person" menus with options.
• Individual items - This is a simple list of all the individual items, with individual prices that you can add to the event at a per head price.

How to add Food & Drink items to an event

To add a food and drink item to an event. First go to the event dashboard, select 'Event Planning' then 'Food & Drink' on the left hand menu. Once on the Food & Drink page, you can then select the + Select new button on the itinerary item where you want to add your Food & Drink item. 

Once you select the + Select items button, A tray will open on the right hand side of the screen with 3 subheadings; Menus, Individual Items, and + New Items. There will also be an option to set the itinerary item to Externally Catered.

• Externally catered Toggle - If you are using an external caterer, you need to toggle Food & Drink Items to yes, then toggle Externally Catered to yes.

• Menus - Here you can search and select menus for your itinerary item. You can also use the down-facing arrow to view, select or unselect specific items that you want to include or remove from the menu. If the whole menu is selected it will be highlighted blue with an outline, but if only certain items are selected from a menu the menu will be outlined. If you want to select all menu items, expand the menu using the dropdown arrow, then click on 'Select all'.
  • Outlined menus indicate that some food & drink items are selected but not all
  • Blue highlighted menus indicate that the whole menu is selected for the event

• Individual items - In the Individual items tab you can view and select/unselect any items that you added at venue management level. You can also use the search bar to find an item quickly and easier if you have a large amount of food & drink items. 

• + New Items - Here you can add new food & drink items that are specific to the event that you are adding it to. These will not be available in other events unless you add the item at venue management level.

Once you have selected and added food & drink items click 'Save'. 

This will close the Pop-up menu, where you will now see that the itinerary item you have just edited has the menus/food & drink items below it

How to edit items & quantities

Once you have added the Food & Drink item or menu to the itinerary, you will now want to be able to update the quantities of the item, so you can plan and track with your customer/internal catering team.

To update the numbers, simply select the "Food & Drink" tab on the left hand navigation. Once here you will be able to move between days using the tabs at the top of the page

In the Food & Drink section, you can select 3 dots menu on the item you want to edit and click edit. This will then allow you to edit the item, add tasting notes and also update the quantity.

This information will then show in the view and you will be able to see total numbers and prices for each part of the itinerary.

You can also delete items here which are no longer wanted. This will remove them from the itinerary as well. To do this select the bin icon and confirm that you want to delete the item. This can be useful for when you work with Set menus. Where you can add the whole menu to the event and then remove the options that have not been selected by your customer.

Dietary information

A key part of Hostology is how the dietary information of the guests attending the event is visible to you and your team.

Dietary information for confirmed guests automatically pulls through to your view, where you can see this in the Food & Drink section here and also in the PDF Download:

This information comes from the Guest list that your customer creates. Where either your host can add dietary information (when creating the guests) or their guests can add dietary information (when RSVPing to the event).

All this information is linked to which parts of the day the guests are invited to, so will pull through accordingly.

You can learn more about how your Customers can create and add their guest lists / Dietary information in this article here. Or, please feel free to discuss with a Hostology consultant if you would like more information ([e-mail])

You can also add in a dietary note to each part of the day which has Food & Drink. To do this, simply go to the "Food & Drink" section and go to the itinerary item you want to add a dietary note to. You will then see a button by each section saying "Dietary note".

Select this and you can then add in information about any specific dietary matters you need to add. This can be useful if your customer has not added a guest list but informed you of dietaries. Or if a specific guest has called in due to specific or severe allergens they may have. This information will show in your PDF download for the Chef sheet.

Next Steps

Check out this article about how your guests can use Table Plans

Check out this article about how to add Suppliers

Check out this article about how to Add Documents