Heading Home
An opportunity arose through a family friend to do the Upper Hunter Show one weekend at Muswellbrook Showground, working with a family-run catering company and their food van fleet. Here I met the wonderful Lady J (as we’ll call her) who was the Event Catering Manager. We got to talking (naturally) and just clicked. She had been looking at hiring someone to come on board as her Assistant and to work alongside her and the crew for these types of events. Enter, Cat.
For me, this was a chance to move back to Newcastle/Maitland and be closer to my partner, family, and friends as well as provide an introduction to a different side of the events world - Event Catering. So, I packed up my things and headed home.
Working with the company and Lady J was an invaluable experience and one where I hit the ground running. It was a very physical role and required you to think on your feet as every day was literally a whole new experience.
I found the best part of the job was being able to travel to a new location, set up a pop up kitchen as your main base and then organise to outsource the food and beverages to each of the food vans that were set up within the event grounds. This meant a lot of planning and logistics in the lead up to and during the event. Things like: Working out who would supervise each van and the team working in each van and their rosters for each day. Determining how much stock was required for each van/outlet to ensure it kept up with the volume of customers anticipated for each day of the event through to sourcing local suppliers in the area ahead of time to set up orders and arranging daily deliveries so we always had fresh produce to serve.
This type of work was seasonal at first and so part of my role was to source and tender for upcoming events that could provide recurring business for us and fill the event calendar for the year. This was something I really enjoyed to do and I was able to put my writing and talking skills to work. Within the first four months of working with the company, I successfully obtained two large catering accounts. The first was Shore Thing, a NYE music festival in Bondi (15,000 attendees) and the other was Norco – Primex in Casino. This was a three day event, which had 10,000 attendees/day.
In collaboration with the General Manager, we also successfully tendered for and won the catering contract for the Lake Macquarie International Children’s Games Opening and Closing Ceremony (3000+ participants and spectators).
Other highlights during my time with the company was working on events such as: Groovin' the Moo Music Festival (All Age Catering Area), Maitland/ Hunter Valley Caravan, Camping Show, Australian National Field Days (Orange),Emirates Scone Cup (General Public Area) and Coca Cola Concerts in the Park as part of the Tamworth Country Music Festival.
