At the start of summer - How to feed 100 people with barbecues and enjoy your own party
21.6.2017
Translation: machine translated
Summer. Friday. Closing time. Hungry. Thirsty. Time to relax and fire up the barbecue. Add a cold beer or a cola and the evening is a success. Recently, however, a small team from Digitec Galaxus AG was faced with the task of catering for 100 people at a barbecue. We learnt a lot and here is our recipe for success.
Barbecues are part of life in Switzerland. Barbecues bring people together, create friendships and in the end everyone has eaten well and drunk well. In other words: barbecuing is a pleasure. At the start of summer, we are also drawn outside to sizzle meat and vegetables over a flame.
At our company, we have a few traditions that change from time to time. One of them is what started out as a "Friday Beer". Originally, it went like this: an invitation went out for a Friday evening, we met up and had a drink together. Today, Friday Beer is still called Friday Beer, but it has little in common with the original event. We offer a supporting programme and we always come up with something new.
So it was clear to me and Marketing Assistant Pia that we had to organise Friday Beer better and bigger than our predecessors. As we were awarded the Friday Beer of the Month for June, it was clear to us that we would go out and barbecue!
During the preparations, we thought a lot, planned a lot and learnt a lot. We would like to pass this knowledge on to you, because then you too can successfully organise a really big barbecue. After all, what could be better than simply inviting everyone outside at the start of summer?
The simple alternative
"You, what do we do if the weather is bad?" Pia asks me at a preparation meeting. We've already learnt our first lesson.
If you're planning a barbecue, you have to expect bad weather.
So when choosing the food, we made sure that - apart from the obvious barbecues - we only got food that tastes good both indoors and outdoors.
- Chips and other aperitif food
- Sandwiches
- Vegetable sticks with dips
- Iced tea
- Prosecco
- Beer
- Water
We asked a wholesaler in Zurich what the situation was with sausages and suchlike, as we didn't want to place a pre-order three weeks before the event. We were worried about the weather. No problem. The wholesaler's advice: place a second order for the barbecues and check in advance whether you can order at short notice. And how short the deadline is.
The organisation at the barbecue
The weather was fine and we received an email on the Monday before the party: We're going outside and having a barbecue.
"You, what are we going to do with the vegetarians," I ask Pia.
She thinks for a moment and then says "Easy. Let's make two barbecues and one is just for meat and one just for vegetables. We'll just label them with notes and that's it". Grilled cheese and grilled vegetables find their way onto our order. We have also decided not to use pork, but have sent out an email inviting people to bring their own barbecues.
We didn't have a barbecue master because we decided to simply set up the two barbecues, one pair of tongs per barbecue and then hand over the sceptre to the partygoers. That worked wonderfully and people who hardly ever meet in normal everyday life got to talk to each other at the barbecue. That's exactly what Friday Beer is all about: we meet up, get to know each other and eat well.
The choice of barbecue
We thought about the barbecue: How big does a barbecue need to be? The answer comes from the East: Pia used to live in St. Gallen and I'm from St. Gallen. So we're familiar with the sight of a bratwurst grill. Some kind of metal rectangle with a gas cylinder underneath and nobody has to wait long for their sausage. We then gave this description to product managers Martin Egli and Patrick Bucher and the response was something like "Oh, we know exactly what you're looking for!"
Yup, looks exactly as it should.
Cooling without a fridge
Friday comes around and the barbecue is starting to look like it's going to happen. Because towards the end, Pia and I found about a hundred more things that we immediately escalated into an extremely bad problem and thought were going to be the downfall of the party, but in the end weren't so bad after all.
- We asked the smokers not to just throw their stubs away because we're outside on a lawn
- The same goes for beer mats and empty bottles, rubbish and all sorts of other things
- Whoever empties the crate of beer and has to fetch new beer should please fetch as much as he or she can carry so that everyone has beer
"Hey, but the beer's warm," says Nadine Widmer from the Marketing Operations office after she bursts into my office just before lunchtime.
Oha.
Oha.
Good point. Because the beer has been sitting around for about two hours and there are still about five hours until the event. Even the best bottle of beer can't keep up and the beer is warm. The alarm bells are ringing.
But Pia and Nadine skilfully save the day. Thomas Schneider, also from Marketing Operations, happens to be there by car. So he volunteers to be mollycoddled and goes to buy crushed ice. We pack this together with beer in four cool boxes, and voilà! The four cool boxes are strategically placed on the small festival site and the party can begin.
At 5 pm, the party starts. And a few hours later: happy faces, full bellies and empty bottles. Everything is pretty well tidied up and I don't think anyone has had a bad time.
You can do that.
The cleaning
However, Pia and I are not done with the organisation. At the end of the day, we have the unglamorous task of cleaning the barbecues. So we put on dark clothes that we can easily get dirty and get to work.
The grill can simply be taken apart and then we can get on with the scrubbing. There are no nooks and crannies that we'd only be able to get into with delicate hands or anything like that, but we can get to work with a fairly coarse motor.
Half an hour later, we're done and can hand over the organisation of the Friday Beers to another team. And I can write this article here so that you too can barbecue for 100 people and still enjoy your own party.
The lessons in a nutshell
So what have we learnt? Simple:
- Make an indoor replacement plan
- Order water
- Place two orders: You can pre-order indoor food for the long term, barbecues for the short term
- Two barbecues: one for vegetarians, one for meat eaters
- Don't buy pork
- Invite your guests to bring their own barbecues
- Keep the beer cool
- Whoever goes to get beer in the cellar, get as much as he or she can carry
- Take responsibility for your guests: tidying up is a team effort
- Wear non-sexy clothes when cleaning
Have fun at your barbecue!
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