Catering for a Boardroom Meeting vs. a Company Away Day: Why One Size Doesn't Fit All

"What do I actually order for this one?" is a question most office managers ask themselves more often than they'd like to admit. A boardroom meeting for eight people and a full company away day for two hundred are both, technically, corporate catering. Beyond that, they have almost nothing in common.

Treating them the same is where a lot of catering budgets get wasted, and where a lot of good intentions land flat. Here's how to think about each one properly.

Two Very Different Formats, Two Very Different Jobs

A boardroom meeting is a small, high-stakes room. The people in it are often senior, the agenda is usually dense, and the catering needs to disappear into the background rather than add to the atmosphere. Nobody in a boardroom wants to be managing a plate.

A company away day is the opposite kind of pressure. It runs across a full day, the group is large and mixed in seniority, and the catering has a genuinely different job to do: fuel a programme of briefings, workshops and team activities, keep energy up across several hours, and support a format where people are moving between rooms, standing, or half-listening while they eat.

Same category of spend on paper. Completely different brief in practice.

Boardroom Meetings: Catering That Stays Out of the Way

The best boardroom catering is the kind nobody comments on afterwards, because it simply worked. A few principles make the difference.

Keep it quiet and low-mess. Nothing that crunches, drips, or needs two hands. Small, refined bites that can sit untouched for twenty minutes without looking sad, and that can be eaten one-handed while someone's other hand is on a laptop or a pen.

Match the formality of the room. This is often where executive teams, board members, or external stakeholders are forming an impression of the business. The food should read as considered rather than lavish. A well-sourced, seasonal selection says more about the company than an overly elaborate spread.

Time it precisely. Boardroom meetings run to tight agendas. Coffee and pastries need to be ready before people walk in, and the rest of service planned to match the order of the day.

It’s also key to have the dietary needs of all attendees locked down ahead so nobody needs to raise their hand and interrupt the meeting to raise this issue. Get the dietary information sorted in advance so every plate works for everyone at the table, without anyone needing to ask. Our guide on catering for a mixed-dietary team without the stress covers how to handle this in a smooth and seamless way.

If you're new to sourcing a caterer for this kind of meeting specifically, our guide on how to choose an office caterer in London is a useful starting point before you brief anyone.

Company Away Days: Catering That Lifts The Team

A company away day has a different set of jobs for the food to do, and they're of a bigger nature. The day usually moves through several distinct phases, a morning briefing, breakout workshops, a catered lunch, some form of team building, and often drinks to close, and the catering needs to flex with each one rather than treating the day as a single meal occasion with a schedule attached.

Make everyone feel considered, not just fed. With a large, mixed group, dietary needs are guaranteed to be varied. Vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free and allergen-aware options need to be genuinely equal in quality and presentation, not an afterthought table at the side. Food is one of the few tangible signals of how much a company actually thinks about its people, and an away day is exactly the kind of event where that signal gets noticed.

Design for the format, not just the numbers. Across a day that moves between briefings, workshops and team activities, people are rarely seated for long. Bowl food, grazing tables and easy, one-handed options tend to work far better than a single formal spread, purely because of how the day actually behaves.

Think about flow, not just volume. With up to two hundred people moving between sessions, the real risk isn't running out of food, it's a bottleneck. Multiple serving points, a spread-out layout, and food that doesn't require queuing at a single station all matter more at this scale than the menu itself.

Use it as a culture moment. An away day is one of the few times the whole company is out of the office together. Good catering here reinforces whatever the day is trying to achieve, whether that's aligning everyone around a strategy update or simply giving teams the chance to properly connect. If your organisation has shifted to more hybrid patterns, it's also worth reading why hybrid working has changed corporate catering forever, since away days are often the one moment fully remote or hybrid teams are physically together, which changes what the catering needs to achieve.

The Middle Ground: What About Everything In Between?

Most companies don't only run boardroom meetings and full away days. There's a wide middle ground: department meetings, client pitches, smaller offsites for a single team. The useful question isn't "how many people," it's "what does this event need the food to do?"

A rule of thumb that holds up well: the smaller and more senior the room, the more the catering should recede into the background. The larger, longer and more mixed the event, the more the catering needs to actively do work, on inclusion, on energy, and on making people feel the day was planned with care.

Getting the Brief Right From the Start

The single biggest cause of mismatched catering comes down to the briefing process. "Catering for 15 people" tells a supplier almost nothing useful. "A boardroom meeting with senior external stakeholders, low mess, one-handed food, ready by 9am" tells them everything they need.

The same applies at scale. "Catering for 200" is a very different brief to "a full company away day with a wide range of dietary needs, several serving windows across the morning briefing, workshops, lunch and team activities, and multiple points to avoid queuing." That's why it's worth having a collaborative relationship with the caterer you work with, and giving them as much information as possible about the day and who's attending, not just the size and time.

If you're weighing up what any of this costs before you get into specifics, our guide on the true cost of office catering in London breaks down what actually drives pricing across different formats and group sizes. And if you'd like a hand thinking through the brief itself, whether it's a boardroom for eight or a full away day for two hundred, get in touch with our team and find out more about our corporate offerings.