Catering Tenders

Tsaks Consulting are experts at writing winning catering and hospitality bids and tenders for companies across the United Kingdom. We have helped companies in the catering and hospitality industry win tenders in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. This extends to and includes all major cities, including London, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cardiff, and Belfast.

We’ve helped clients win public sector tenders as well as private sector tenders and have an understanding of the qualitative and pricing components of catering and hospitality industry contracts.

Catering and Hospitality Contracts we have helped clients win

Our team of bid writers have helped clients secure government, NHS and private sector catering and hospitality contracts for a range of services including:

Food Service Tenders:

• School meal catering: including writing bids for our clients to operate school canteens and provide school meals to public and private schools as well as kindergarten and nursery schools.
• Hospital food services: Including helping catering providers bid for large contracts to supply catering and food services to both NHS, public and private hospitals.
• University dining halls: Through bids and also framework applications, we have helped catering and food service providers to bid for contracts with tertiary education institutions.
• Corporate canteens: We have helped catering providers tender for the operation of corporate canteens in major corporations and institutions.
• Event catering: Our team has written bids to major event managers and organisers for the provision of catering service providers.

Hospitality Tenders:

• Hotel management: We have helped private housekeeping, catering companies and other hospitality services providers bid for hotel management tenders.
• Conference and event venues: Including the provision of catering, cleaning and other services associated with conferences and events.
• Leisure and recreation facilities: We have helped clients write winning bids and win contracts for the operation of a range of leisure and recreation facilities.

How to write winning catering and hospitality tenders to the public sector

UK Government Guidelines for Food

When preparing a tender to provide catering services to the public sector in the UK, there are certain requirements you must abide by. Catering service suppliers must adhere to guidelines set out by the UK Government, ensuring food is fresh, safe, and nutritious.

Key points to consider when submitting catering and hospitality services bids to the UK Government include:

• Meals must be delivered with at least one or more servings of salad each day
• There must be three differing fruit varieties, and three vegetable varieties every week.
• Encouraging water over sugary drinks and any other drink
• Fruit juice limitations to 150ml per day
• Drinks with sugar, or added sugar, should have a sugar content no greater than 5%
• Commitment to wholegrain foods over refined carbohydrates
• Limit portions of deep-fried, breadcrumb-battered, or batter-coated food to no more than twice a week
• Foods containing pastry should be limited to two servings per week.

Demonstrating an understanding of the public sector

If you are bidding for a public sector catering, food or hospitality contract, it’s critical that you demonstrate an understanding of the public sector. You can do this by:

• Talking about how your organisation and business values align with the public sector values of money, quality and social responsibility.
• Ensuring your bid or tender aligns with the relevant procurement regulations and the criteria of the RFP, RFQ or Framework. You also need to clearly adhere to the tender evaluation criteria.

Tailor your catering bid to the specific contract or tender to win

When writing your bid for a catering contract, it’s tempting to cut and paste previous content. However, you need to allocate the time and resources to tailor your bid. Talk about the specific catering service and the needs and challenges that may arise (for example, catering to a large amount of school pupils or providing high-end catering to professionals), and then explain in your methodology how you will overcome and meet these challenges.

You also need to show how your proposal and service will deliver downstream value to the local community from an economy and social perspective. You need to talk about any sustainable practices, and align the experience of your business, as well as personnel, with the type of service that you are proposing to provide. I.e. If you are bidding for a contract with a high school, then other education sector, or similar experience should be included, however, providing high end catering services to the corporate sector may not be as relevant.

Write your bid in a tailored and structured manner

The key here is to adopt concise and simple English. Write in an easy to understand way. You need to make your bid or tender easy for the procurement team to mark. When procurement teams working for the government, NHS, private sector or framework organisation review catering bids, they often have to read through ten or twenty bids. This can become tiresome and they generally do not want to read through a whole lot of irrelevant marketing text.

Put forward a compelling executive summary that details why your service offering is the right one, and go into detail, however, ensure it is concise detail that adds real value. Finally, use headings and sub-heading to structure your response and make it easier for the reader.

Government Departments and Institutions we have helped our clients write Catering Bids to the in UK

Our consultants have helped clients write catering and hospitality bids to a number of government departments and institutions including:

• Ministry of Defence (MoD): They are a major procurer of catering services. These are mainly associated with catering to bases and for personnel. There are additional requirements from a security clearance perspective that businesses need to adhere to for MoD bids and our team helps our clients ensure they comply.
• Department for Education (DfE): The DfE releases contracts for catering in schools and other educational institutions. Adhering to nutritional rules is crucial and we have helped small catering providers win contracts with their local schools. One of the best winning strategies is to focus on your locality if you are locally based.
• Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC): These are mostly catering contracts for hospitals, care homes and other healthcare facilities. To win these contracts, we ensure clients focus on hygiene and their experience or capabilities providing catering services in a healthcare environment. The National Health Service including individual trusts and organisations also release catering tenders which we have helped our clients respond to.
• Prison Service: The Prison Service requires catering services for prisons across the UK. We have helped clients write bids and responds to RFPs and RFQs for catering in prisons.

In addition to the above, our bid writers have helped clients write and win tenders to many government departments such as the Home Office, Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) as well as Local Authorities including Local councils and municipalities often contract catering services for schools, libraries, leisure centers, and other public facilities.

The challenges you encounter when writing catering and hospitality sector bids

Our writers will help you write a bid or proposal that positions your business for success. We will work with you to read between the lines of the contract and understand any underlying issues that need to be addressed. We will quickly gain an understanding of your business and what differentiates you in the market – as well as identify key win themes which need to be interwoven through your bid to ensure consistent messaging.

Our team of bid writers know how to write a successful catering tender to both the public and private sector, and can provide you with response examples of winning tenders. As a leading hospitality bid writing consultancy operating across the UK, we’ve helped large catering providers win and also retain existing contracts, as well as smaller catering providers win new contracts.

We will work with you to ensure you showcase your company’s abilities, demonstrating that your services go above and beyond the requirements of the tender and will deliver a consistent quality of service over the long term. Furthermore, we will ensure you detail and evidence your experience, write concisely to maximise the wordcount, and provide a structured and comprehensive response to each question. This results in higher evaluation scores, and a winning chance at your next catering tender in the UK.

Examples of catering tender challenges in the UK include:

The Menu
You need to prove that you can fulfil your catering service with fresh, healthy, nutritious, high-quality food throughout the lifecycle of the contract. You will need to have competitive prices while also providing staff with fair wages. Tsaks Consulting can assist you in displaying your ability to fulfil these services by thorough planning and the presentation of items such as menu plans.

Your supply network
When considering your catering tender application, the evaluator will be looking to see if your food and drink will be grown, produced, and packaged efficiently and ethically, in an environmentally friendly manner.

Tsaks consulting can assist you in proving your best supply chain practices, demonstrating your close collaboration with all parties involved in the supply chain process of your service delivery, and all equipment and machinery involved.

Food safety

For any hospitality industry bid or tender, food safety is critical. You will need to provide a comprehensive food management and safety plan, ensure all of your personnel have the appropriate food safety qualifications and certifications, and make sure you have a food safety training program in place. If you have premises, you will need to demonstrate the premises comply with any relevant food safety regulations.

A fit-out plan

When you are bidding to operate in a designated establishment, you may be required to provide a fit-out plan. This gives you the opportunity to present your vision for the project. You should detail your proposed fit-out, as well as the total budget / expenditure you have allocated to the project. Your fit-out should be consistent with your proposed menu and overall branding and design.

Common types of catering and hospitality tenders

There are many different types of hospitality and catering tenders across the UK in different industries. For example, there are contract opportunities for the provision of catering services to schools, hospitals and other public buildings and establishments. These are now governed by the 2014 Plan for Public Procurement of Food which was designed to focus food purchasing on healthy food from local suppliers.

The different types of tenders and bids include:

• Tenders for fresh produce: Tenders for fresh produced are one of the most common tenders from the NHS in major cities and local councils in the UK. They request services for fruit and vegetables, meat, and drinks.
• Tenders for school catering: Tenders for school catering in the UK are frequently released, with new tenders being released on a weekly basis. Schools in the UK are highly dependent on these tenders, as the supply fresh, healthy, nutritious food and drinks are a vital part of a school’s operation.
• Catering Equipment supply: We have assisted clients to write bids for the supply of catering equipment. This is generally on a large scale and can include catering and hospitality equipment to large government departments such as the Department of Defence.
• Event Services / Entertainment: We assist event management companies, as well as hospitality services providers to write winning bids for event services contracts. There are often multi-faceted and can range from event management to the provision of security and other services for large events.
• Laundry Services: We have assisted clients to complete laundry tenders as well as proposals for the provision of hotel and accommodation management services.

Catering and Hospitality bid writing support

Our team of expert catering bid writers in the UK keep up to date with industry trends and government requirements related to hospitality and catering services in the UK.

With our experience writing winning tenders in the United Kingdom, we can offer you the highest chance of success of winning that next tender. We help clients across all of the United Kingdom including all major cities such as London, Glasgow, Leeds and Birmingham.

Contact our team today to talk about how we can help you increase your chances of success with your next catering contracts.