Raw material list for 100 guests: how to build one from recipes
Search “catering quantity for 100 people” and you get charts: 10 kg rice, 8 kg paneer, 150 rotis. Those charts are somebody else’s kitchen. Their rotis are 35 g, yours are 45 g; their guests are office staff at lunch, yours are a wedding crowd at 10 pm. A chart you did not measure will be wrong in both directions at once: too much of some things, short of others.
The right way takes an hour the first time and five minutes every time after. Here it is for a five-item lunch for 100 guests. The numbers are illustrative; the method is the point.
Step 1: per-guest serving for each item
Measure it in your own kitchen once: cook a known quantity, serve a known number of plates, see what is left. Write it down per item, in the unit you cook in.
| Item | Per guest |
|---|---|
| Veg pulao | 150 g |
| Dal fry | 100 g |
| Paneer masala | 80 g |
| Roti | 2 pieces |
| Boondi raita | 60 g |
A note on the guest count. “100 guests” at a lunch means 100 plates. At a wedding dinner it means perhaps 85 eating and some eating twice; at a seminar it means 70 who show up. Use the number of plates you will actually serve, and keep a separate figure for veg and non-veg if the menu splits.
Step 2: cooked quantity
Multiply. 100 guests × 150 g pulao = 15 kg of cooked pulao. Dal 10 kg, paneer masala 8 kg, roti 200 pieces, raita 6 kg.
Step 3: ingredients, from the recipe
Each item has a recipe for a batch you actually cook, say 5 kg of pulao, with the raw ingredients and their weights. Scale it to the cooked quantity you need.
Pulao, 5 kg batch: 2 kg basmati, 500 g mixed vegetables, 150 g ghee, 50 g whole spices, 2.3 l water (absorbed), salt. For 15 kg, multiply by three: 6 kg rice, 1.5 kg vegetables, 450 g ghee, 150 g spices.
Do the same for the other four items. Then add across items: onions appear in dal, paneer masala and raita; tomato in two; ghee in three. The purchase list is the sum per ingredient, not per dish.
| Ingredient | From pulao | From dal | From paneer | From raita | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basmati rice | 6 kg | 6 kg | |||
| Toor dal | 3.5 kg | 3.5 kg | |||
| Paneer | 3.2 kg | 3.2 kg | |||
| Onion | 1.2 kg | 1.6 kg | 2.8 kg | ||
| Tomato | 1 kg | 2 kg | 3 kg | ||
| Curd | 4.5 kg | 4.5 kg | |||
| Ghee / oil | 450 g | 400 g | 600 g | 1.45 kg | |
| Atta (for roti) | 9 kg |
(Roti is its own line: 200 pieces × 45 g dough ≈ 9 kg atta, plus oil.)
Step 4: the buffer, applied on purpose
Add a buffer to the items that run out and embarrass you, not to everything. Rice and roti: 10%. Dal: 5%. Paneer masala: 0–5%, because paneer is the expensive line and leftovers are waste you paid ₹400 a kg for. Raita: 0%.
The caterer who adds 15% “to be safe” across the board is cooking 115 plates and billing 100. On the paneer line alone that is 480 g of paneer and the cream and butter that go with it, every function.
Step 5: subtract what is in stock, then buy
Rice, dal, atta, oil, spices are usually in stock. The purchase list is requirement minus stock, rounded up to the pack you buy in (a 26 kg bag of rice, a 15 kg tin of oil). Vegetables, paneer, curd and milk are bought fresh for the function.
What changes when the guest count changes
Everything in steps 2–5, proportionally, except the things that are per-function (gas cylinder, packaging). If the customer moves from 100 to 130 guests the day before, you redo the sheet. If the sheet is on paper, you do not redo it; you add “a bit more” and cook 150 plates’ worth.
Where the software comes in
This is the calculation Neviscater does for every event. Each item carries its per-guest serving; each item has a recipe written for the batch you cook; an event’s menu and guest count give the cooked quantity per item and the raw materials across items, netted against stock and rounded up to the pack sizes you buy in. The raw-material PDF is what goes to the market. When the guest count changes, the list changes. If several orders fall in the same two days, Kitchen Plan combines them into one cooking list and one purchase list, with stock counted once.
The per-guest servings and recipes are yours; the software does not guess them. Setting them up is what the onboarding call is for, and it is the hour that makes every order after it five minutes.