Remote & large-scale
Large and remote sites.
Paddocks four hours from the nearest supplier. Mine camps, film units, regional festivals, station weddings. We arrive self-sufficient, feed everyone properly for days, and leave the ground the way we found it.
Why it’s different
Why a remote site is different.
In town, a caterer who runs short can send someone to a supermarket. Two hours past the last town, that option does not exist — and everybody on site finds out at the same time.
So a remote job is won or lost days before anyone eats. It is a logistics job with a kitchen attached: what you carried, how cold you kept it, whether your generator started, and whether you brought a second one.
We have been doing this long enough to have made most of the mistakes on our own dime. What follows is what we actually do — not a list of things that would be nice.
Self-sufficient by default
What we bring.
Then anything it does give us is a bonus rather than a dependency. If you have mains power and potable water we’ll happily use them, and the quote comes down — but the plan never assumes it.
| What | Why it’s on the truck |
|---|---|
| Silenced diesel generator, plus a second one | The spare is not optional. A generator that will not start at 5am is the single most expensive thing that can happen on a remote job, and it has to be solved without a phone call. |
| Refrigerated trailer or reefer | Our cold store on site. Temperature logged, not guessed — see the cold chain below. |
| Potable water carriage and food-grade tanks | Drinking, cooking and hand-wash water carried in, kept separate from anything else. |
| Hand-wash and sanitiser stations | A dedicated hand-wash basin with warm water is a legal requirement for food handling, not a courtesy. We bring our own. |
| LPG cooking suite with spare bottles | Gas rather than electric wherever we can, because it is not on the generator and it does not care about a voltage drop. |
| Grey water capture and waste removal | Nothing goes on the ground. Grey water and waste oil leave with us, and general waste goes to wherever your site plan says. |
| Marquee, flooring, lighting and the full stall build | Our own signage and boards. On a dark site the shack is often the brightest thing in the paddock, which is half of why it works. |
| Fire blanket, extinguishers and a first aid kit | Checked before every bump-in, not once a year. |
| Satellite messenger or UHF where there is no signal | So the site manager can reach the line, and the line can reach the site manager. |
The cold chain
Keeping food cold.
Avocado, dairy, chicken, bacon, salmon, leaves. Everything we cook is either fresh or it is nothing, and on a four-day job in thirty-five degrees the difference between a great event and a serious incident is a temperature log.
- Pre-cooled before it moves. Product goes into the reefer at temperature, not to be brought down in transit.
- Logged on arrival and twice daily after that, by a named person, in writing. Those records go to you if you want them.
- Two-stage storage. Bulk stock stays in the reefer; only the day’s service stock comes to the line, so a busy counter never holds the whole event’s food.
- Anything out of range is destroyed, not judged. That is written into how we roster and how we buy, which is why we carry contingency stock rather than hoping.
If your site has an environmental health officer or a client-side food safety auditor, they get our food safety program, our temperature records and our certificates before we arrive rather than at the gate.
The crew
The crew.
Anyone can cook a good wrap once. Doing it on hour eleven of day three, in the wind, for the four hundredth person, is a different job — and it is entirely about who you brought.
Who comes
A remote crew is built around a core who have worked together for years, not assembled from whoever was free. Every job has one named site lead who owns the run sheet, talks to your event manager and does not also work the line.
- Food handling certification for every person who touches food
- A qualified food safety supervisor on site for the whole service period
- First aid trained crew on every shift
- White card and site inductions completed before we arrive, where your site requires them
How we look after them
Tired crews make food safety mistakes. So fatigue management is part of the quote rather than something we absorb quietly and hope you don’t notice on day three.
- Rostered breaks and capped shift lengths, with enough people to actually take them
- Accommodation and travel costed in — we’ll camp on site if that’s the plan, but it gets planned
- Crew are fed properly from the same menu, at set times
- Driver rest built into bump-in and bump-out, so nobody drives seven hours after a fourteen-hour service
It also means we quote what a job actually costs. If a number looks higher than someone else’s, this is usually where the difference is.
Throughput
How much we can serve.
Real numbers matter more than a big one. We size the setup to your peak hour, not your headcount — two thousand people who all eat at once is a harder problem than five thousand across a day.
| Configuration | Crew | Peak throughput | Suits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Single shack, trade service | 3–4 | ~120 orders/hour | Markets, small festivals, up to ~2,000 gate |
| Single shack, private set menu | 3–5 | ~200 covers/hour | Weddings, conferences, crew feeds to ~400 |
| Extended line, two service points | 6–8 | ~250 orders/hour | Main-stage festivals, multi-session events |
| Multi-setup deployment | Scaled | Multiplied | Large festivals, several zones, or two sites at once |
The process
How a remote job runs.
Six steps. The first two happen weeks out and are the reason the last four are boring, which on a remote job is exactly what you want them to be.
Site survey
In person where we can get there, and over a call with photographs and a map where we can’t. We are looking for the things that change the plan rather than the price: vehicle access and ground conditions in the wet, turning circle for a reefer trailer, distance to the nearest hard stand, whether there is any power or potable water, phone signal, and where waste can go.
We will tell you at this point if we think your site needs something we haven’t got. That is a better conversation eight weeks out than on the day.
Menu and volumes
We build the menu around what travels and what holds, then work backwards to a purchase order. Remote menus are deliberately tighter than metropolitan ones — fewer dishes done superbly, with contingency stock behind each of them, beats a long menu that runs out of its most popular item at lunchtime on day two.
You get a written menu with per-head quantities, dietary counts and the assumptions we’ve made, so you can correct our maths before it becomes a shopping list.
Paperwork
Temporary food premises notification with the relevant council, public liability certificate of currency, food safety program, allergen matrix, SWMS where your site requires them, and gas and electrical test-and-tag records. All of it goes to your event manager as a pack, ahead of time.
Load-out and travel
Packed against a checklist, not from memory. Cold stock loads last and comes out first. Travel is planned with driver rest built in, and we arrive with enough margin to build in daylight — a stall built in the dark by a crew who’ve driven six hours is where the avoidable problems come from.
Service
Cooked to order for the whole session. The site lead holds the run sheet and is contactable throughout; if your numbers move on the day, tell them and we’ll flex rather than find out at the counter.
We keep a live count through service, so at any point we can tell you how many we’ve fed and how much is left. On a multi-day job that number decides what we cook tomorrow.
Bump-out
Everything struck and hauled. Grey water, waste oil and our own rubbish leave with us. Ground is raked, pegs are pulled and counted, and the site lead walks it with your event manager before we drive off.
You get a short written wrap-up afterwards: numbers served, what ran out, what we’d change. Most caterers don’t send that. It is the most useful thing we produce.
Contingency
If something goes wrong.
Weather, breakdowns, a road that closes, numbers that double. None of these are unusual. All of them are survivable if somebody planned for them.
- Redundant power and gas. Second generator, spare bottles, and a service that can run on gas alone if it has to.
- Contingency stock on the truck as standard — not a percentage we made up, but real cover on the three items that always go first.
- A wet-weather plan in the run sheet, agreed with you before the day, including what happens to the queue and whether the marquee stays up in wind.
- Spares for the things that break: hoses, regulators, fittings, a spare gas ring, and the tools to change them.
- An escalation path with names on it. You know who to call, and so do we.
From you
What we need from you.
Send as much of this as you have. Missing pieces are fine — we’ll ask — but every one you can answer takes a guess out of the number.
- Where the site is, and the last sealed road before it
- Dates, including bump-in and bump-out windows
- Expected numbers, and when they all want to eat
- Whether there is power, and what kind
- Whether there is potable water
- Ground conditions, and what happens to them in rain
- Vehicle access, including anything a trailer can’t do
- Phone signal, or the lack of it
- Who else is catering, if anyone
- Any site inductions, permits or client requirements we’ll need to meet
Enquiries
Tell us about the site.
A remote job doesn’t price off a form. There is no per-head number that survives contact with a two-hour drive, a generator and a shower block — so we’d rather read about it and come back to you properly.
What to send us
You won’t have all of it. Send what you have and we’ll ask about the rest — the first four get you a real answer on their own.
- Where it is. A town, a station name or a dropped pin. Distance from the nearest supermarket is the number that moves a remote quote most.
- How many, and for how long. Head count per sitting, how many sittings a day, and how many days.
- What the site has. Power, potable water, refrigeration, waste, and whether there is anywhere to sleep.
- Access. Sealed road, gravel, or four-wheel-drive only — and any gate, weight or curfew limits on the way in.
- Who’s eating. Crew, guests, or both, and any dietaries you already know about.
- Dates, even rough ones. A window is enough to tell you whether we’re free.
The quickest way
Email us
Straight to the people who would run it. We answer our own inbox, usually the same day.
That link opens an email with the list above already in it, so you can fill in the gaps and send.
Rather use a form? The catering enquiry takes the same details — just say “remote site” in the last box and skip anything that doesn’t apply. It won’t price a remote job on the spot, and it isn’t meant to.
Tell us about your site.
Those two answers get you a real conversation. Everything else we can work out together.