Breaking It Down: The Cost Of The Wedding Menu

The Challenge: Design, cook, and implement a dinner menu for a backyard wedding with a budget of $1000. We have a menu, we have a final head count (50!) so how much is all this food going to cost? 

When we last talked about the wedding catering project we mainly discussed estimating food quantities. Today it’s time to get into the numbers side of things. How much does food for 50 cost?! First a quick recap of the menu and then we’ll get down and dirty with those numbers. 

• Pulled Pork
• Brisket- This was originally going to be a chicken salad, but as we’re serving 50 instead of 80, and can now afford something nicer and stay in the budget. So we switched it up to brisket which is way tastier, but more expensive. I’m purchasing this pre-cooked from a local BBQ joint, rather then doing it myself to give myself a little bit of a break! Smoking brisket on top of everything else is more then I can realistically pull off. 
• Black Bean, Chickpea, & Quinoa Burgers 
• Pesto Pasta Salad 
• Roasted Potato Salad With Mustard & Rosemary
• Green Salad with Strawberries, Candied Pecans, Feta, and a Simple Balsamic 

• Sangria 
• Flavored Lemonade
• Water
• Beer (The groom is in charge of this one.)

+ Wedding cake, and the Bride has requested a champagne toast as well. 

Rather then list everything out in a big long paragraph I figured I’d make you a handy dandy table. (BTW I’m giving you the items priced before tax.)

A few notes:

• I went to several different stores, (Sam’s Club, King Soopers, Sprouts, Safeway, Total Beverage, Party City, and even purchased from Amazon) to get the best price possible for each item I needed.
• I ended up over purchasing a few ingredients (for example 12 bags of pasta) because they came in bulk but were cheaper that way, or because I thought I might be needing more then I actually did.
• I added seltzer water to the sangria to stretch it a bit further, brilliant last minute idea! 
• I also ended up with a discount on the tiered cake. It should have been $67 rather then $49.90 but it was crooked. I’ll probably complain more about that later. 
• I added a little snack plate for the bridal party for before everything got started, very simple, cheese, salami, and crackers! 
• If you’re curious the total amount of tax spent on everything was: $56.38
• On the actual wedding evening we also had to purchase ice, extra zip locks, foil, and a few other things I can’t remember at this moment.
• We came to an aprox. grand total of $980 for everything! (I’m sure it was $980.63 or something but I’m not going to try and exactly total up our last min purchases, just rounded them and added them to the numbers above.) Meaning we did cater a wedding for a budget of $1000! I would like to note, I’m pretty confident we could have catered for the original 80 and remained in budget if we had kept the chicken salad and possibly skipped the champagne toast.

Otherwise that’s about it. I’ll give you more details about how everything turned out the day of, how well I estimated quantities, how the food was received, and anything else I think of on Friday. Oh, and I’ll complain properly about the crooked cake! Meanwhile, hope this is helpful!