Ordering lunch for a room is a logistics job before it is a food job, and the same five things go wrong whoever is doing the ordering. None of them is about taste.
Nobody asked about diets until the week of. Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, keto and low-carb are not edge cases in an office of thirty; they are most of the room by the time you add them up. Ask when you book, not when the food arrives. We cook those as dishes in their own right rather than as a plate of sides, and everything is labelled so nobody has to interview a colleague about what is in the tray.
The food arrives when the meeting does. A delivery that lands at the start of a session gets eaten cold an hour later. Give a window rather than a time, and tell us what happens either side of it.
It is one big tray when it should be thirty boxes, or the other way round. If people take lunch back to a desk, individually packed wins every time. If the room eats together and talks, family-style is better and cheaper. The right answer depends on the hour, not the budget.
Portions are guessed from headcount alone. Lunch after a morning of training is not lunch during a two-hour review. Tell us what the day is and we will size it to that.
The same order, every month. Repetition is what turns a good perk into furniture. If you run a standing lunch, rotate it — the menu is a starting point, and changing it costs nothing.
