For some people, the word “catering” brings up images of fancy meal stations, white-gloved servers, and a long bill at the end of the meal. While that sort of lunch is nice occasionally, it’s not feasible for day-to-day workplace dining.

Most of the time, you’re working with a strict limit of how much you can spend per person while also juggling the different dietary needs and restaurant requests from your team. We know that can be daunting for those who are put in charge of finding a caterer to feed a team without spending too much. It may seem like an impossible task, but we’re here to help!

At ezCater, we’re making it simple for you to find plenty of options for the meals you need for whatever budget or order size you’re working with. Follow along in this walk-through to see how you can find an on-budget meal for your entire team that doesn’t sacrifice quality or taste using some simple search options on ezCater. 

Find food that has a low per-person cost

Before you begin searching for a meal, be sure to keep in mind our top 16 lunch ideas for under $8: wonton soup, kabab rolls, grain bowls, Mexican tortas, stir frys, and more. These types of meals usually stay on the cheaper side, so they’re always a good option. You can also consider other ways to keep your catered meal on budget.

But for today’s example, we’ll focus on finding individual lunches for our team. We’re catering an office lunch meeting for eight people and we’re authorized to spend no more than $15 per person.

How to use ezCater’s headcount filters to budget catering orders

Let’s start by setting the budget and headcount in the ezCater filters. In the top navigation bar, choose the “Add headcount” drop-down and set the headcount to eight.

Now, just above the “763 Boston Caterers” header, you’ll see a row of buttons. Choose the “Budget” button. In the dialog box, choose a total price based either on “per person” or “total”. 

In this case, we’ll enter $15, leave the drop-down as “per person,” and click apply. This will set you up to only see the restaurants with meal options at or under your budget, making restaurant selection easy.

After those variables are in, you’ll see a full list of local restaurants that provide catering inside of your selected parameters. Our theoretical team is craving some fresh Middle Eastern fare, so we’ve decided to go with the restaurant Shawarma Falafel in Boston, MA for our lunch meeting.

From the Catering Menu entrees, we choose the Chicken Shawarma Roll-Up Combo. The menu lets us select eight people, and since this boxed lunch is $10.85/person, we already know it fits into our budget.

Once this is added into the cart, you’ll see a breakdown of the total cost, including any taxes or tip you’d like to add. 

Note: You can also toggle between price-per-head for just the food or a price-per-head that includes tip and delivery costs.

Since we’ve got a little bit of wiggle room here, and the meeting in question includes several C-Suite executives, we’ve decided to add something special to make this meeting a little sweeter. We’ll move to the dessert section of the menu and add baklava for eight.

The added baklava still brings the order in under our target budget, so at this point we could add some falafel, extra baklava, or another side. Then we’ll just go ahead and check out. Whatever we do, we’ve found a delicious meal under budget that everyone can enjoy. This team will be one happy lunch bunch.

Hopefully this quick tutorial helps you on your way to finding food for your team at a reasonable price. Catering breakfast, lunch, and dinner doesn’t always have to be a lavish affair. Finding economical catering options is possible when you set a budget and use the simple tools ezCater offers to help you stick to it. And with a seemingly-endless catalogue of local restaurants ranging in price per person, you’re sure to find what you need for the perfect, economical lunch meeting.