Catering
No, we have speciality cakes for that.
If you’re ordering hot food, it will arrive a maximum of 15-20 minutes before you plan to eat. If you’re ordering cold food and you have refrigeration onsite, we can deliver any time that works for you.
Yes. You can choose from lightweight reusable enamel plates, bowls, and metal cutlery (with a small collection fee), or 100% compostable disposable items. Our napkins are 100% compostable paper, recycled and unbleached.
To make the most of your sustainable catering, you can add takeaway boxes and signage for leftovers.
We also offer a range of crockery, cutlery, linen and glassware options for more formal occasions.
Open Kitchen MCR caters for all dietary requirements. Please make us aware via the order form or when you initially speak to the team and our chefs will develop a menu to suit your guests.
Open Kitchen delivers catering across all areas of Greater Manchester including Manchester City Centre, as well as Warrington and Preston. Subject to availability and an additional delivery charge, we can deliver further afield to areas such as Liverpool.
We ask for 48 hours. If your event is in less than 48 hours, give us a call and we’ll see what we can do.
Generally, our minimum order number is for 10 people, but if you want to order poke bowls, crisps, or canned drinks and waters, we can cater for smaller groups.
We have no maximum number of people we can cater for and have delivered food to events for 400+ attendees.
Generally, we don’t offer run offers or provide discounts. As a small CIC, all our profits go back into the local community.
Sustainability
When we talk about surplus, or food we intercept from the supply chain, we’re talking about food that comes from partnerships we’ve built with restaurants, supermarkets, and other organisations across Greater Manchester.
It’s not food that’s past its best. The surplus we intercept reaches us for a range of reasons:
- A supermarket overestimates demand for an item and orders too much
- A restaurant updates their menu and no longer needs a certain ingredient
- Missed deliveries that never make it back to the depot
- Produce doesn’t meet requirements for shape and size
It’s all in perfectly good condition, but destined for landfill. We repurpose it into quality catering or redistribute it to our community partners to help people facing food insecurity.
And there is always ultimately a little waste each year, because we would never serve or redistribute intercepted food that wasn’t quality.
Sustainable catering is designed to minimise waste and any negative impact on the environment. At Open Kitchen, sustainability runs through everything we do – we sustainably source ingredients, take a zero-waste approach to cooking, use sustainable packaging and an electric delivery van. We also publish our carbon accounting stats and have developed a plan to achieve Net Zero by 2040.
We take sustainable catering a step further, as we also seek to maximise our positive impact, by intercepting perfectly good food that would otherwise go to waste and repurposing it into quality catering or redistributing it to community groups. Plus, all our profits go back into the community.
Our chefs create bespoke menus using our unique mix of ethically and sustainably sourced ingredients and the perfectly good food we intercept from going to landfill. The framework of each menu is consistent, while the specific fillings and flavours change regularly to reflect the seasons and what’s available.
We’ll advise you on how you can both provide catering that works for all your attendees and minimise waste at your event. To maximise the impact of your sustainable catering, check out our fundraising initiative, Menu for Change.
