Every time you plan to throw a party or arrange food for a wedding reception, you are presented with a bunch of options of food caterers to choose from. These caterers set up their cooking facility very close to your main area of event to provide food. Similarly, a relatively newer concept of ‘mobile catering’ has surfaced recently where food is cooked and served from a vehicle, cart or a truck.

How does mobile catering work?

One would wonder how does mobile catering actually works as vehicles (be it trucks or vans) are meant to be used for commutation and not for selling food meals. However, the recent trend is to install onboard heating, cooking and refrigerating mechanism in the vehicles where fresh food can be cooked and served to people, often near public events (concerts, exhibitions), office blocks or in downtown business districts.

What food does mobile catering normally serve?

Normally, you would find the following foods and beverages items being served from such mobile food outlets. Notice that each item is easy to carry and serve as a quick meal to save time:

• Freshly-made vegetarian food
• Ice cream
• Coffee, Donuts, Bagels

How can mobile food caterers partner with traditional caterers?

Mobile food caterers operate to target a specific type of audience to sell their foods. They do not (and cannot) target people who wish to have a nice and peaceful office lunch or a couple who wish to have a fine dine environment for the meal.

Mobile caterers often pair up with traditional caterers to provide them with all the equipments (grill, stove, refrigerator, etc.) in order for them to cook and serve food to people at the place and the time they want. Traditional caterers are more comfortable providing people food in a large gathering with an equally large set up for them to cook and serve meals. However, mobile caterers bring along the additional flexibility of setting up an entire kitchen virtually anywhere the guest wants.

Another method through which the traditional and mobile caterers can mutually benefit is the transportation of cooked food from the traditional caterers’ site to the desired place through mobile vehicles and trucks. All that needs to be done is to keep food fresh and warm for serving it to the customers in their own areas. This model is true for daily serving of food in a, say, business complex or a busy shopping street, where people are in rush and would want to grab a quick meal to get back to their work or to continue shopping. This maintains the high quality of food that you would normally expect from a traditional food catering company as well as provide customers with availability of food in areas where a normal caterer would not have supplied.

Hence, traditional caterers are experts in cooking and presenting of food to guests whereas mobile caterers can give them all the necessary facilities they would want to do their job as effectively as they would have done under their own traditional set-up.