Festival & Event Food Packaging Checklist (What to Order Per Day)

Order by covers per day, not by gut feel. Work out your realistic covers for each trading day, then multiply through a per-100-covers guide for each item — cups, boxes, napkins, cutlery, sauce pots and bags — and add a sensible buffer on the cheap, bulky items you can't restock mid-event. The tables below give you the rules of thumb and two worked examples, so "how much do we need" turns into a single order before you load the van.

Infographic coming soonA per-100-covers packaging cheat sheet showing quantities for boxes, wrapping paper, napkins, cutlery, sauce pots, cold cups and carrier bags, ready to scale to a trading day.

Start with covers per day

A cover is one served portion. Everything you order scales off it, so pin the number down first. Look at last year, the event's expected footfall, your pitch position and your menu's serving speed. Then estimate conservatively per trading day — a two-day festival at 600 covers a day is a very different order from a one-off 300-cover market.

Once you have a daily cover figure, the rest is multiplication. The guide below is per 100 covers; scale it to your day and sum across trading days.

Per-100-covers packaging guide

Treat this as a rough guide and adjust to your menu — a rice box concept burns through cutlery and sauce pots that a burger stall barely touches.

The spread matters. A burger sells with paper, a napkin and maybe a sauce pot, and no cutlery. A loaded-fries or curry box sells with a box, a cutlery set, two sauce pots and two napkins. Weight the table toward your actual dishes before you order.

Two worked examples

Here's the guide applied to a single trading day at two volumes. Round up to case sizes when you buy.

Multiply by trading days for the full event, then add the buffers below. For a two-day 600-cover festival you are ordering roughly double the right-hand column — which is squarely bulk-order territory.

Serving speed: packaging that keeps the queue moving

At an event your enemy is the queue, and packaging either speeds service or slows it. Handhelds served in a sheet of wrapping paper or on a board go out in seconds — no lid to seat, no box to fold. If your menu allows it, lean on wrap-and-go formats for peak periods and save boxes for dishes that genuinely need containing. Pre-folding a stack of boxes during the quiet hour also buys you speed when the rush hits.

Cold-drink setup for hot days

Weather makes or breaks your drinks order. On a hot day cold-drink demand can double, and running out of cold cups by mid-afternoon is lost revenue you cannot recover. Over-order cold cups relative to the table if the forecast is warm, and make sure your cup size matches your pour and your pricing. Cold cups are cheap, bulky and non-perishable — exactly the profile you buy long rather than short.

Napkin maths per cover

Napkins are the item people most reliably under-order because the per-unit cost hides the volume. Budget two to three serviettes per cover — the lower end for tidy handhelds, the higher end for anything with sauce. At 600 covers a day that is 1,200 to 1,800 napkins daily, and they are the first thing to vanish from a busy pitch. Buy them by the case and keep a reserve box under the counter.

Cutlery and sauce pots: match to the dish

Cutlery only applies to food people cannot eat with their hands, so do not order a set per cover across a mixed menu — count only the dishes that need it. For those, a wrapped cutlery meal pack keeps things hygienic and fast to hand over; our cutlery and meal packs guide covers the formats. Sauce pots scale with your menu's dip-and-drizzle habit — one pot for a single sauce, two for a build-your-own — and the sauce pot sizes guide helps you pick a pot that holds enough without overfilling. Stock both from sauce cups.

What to over-order versus run lean on

Not everything deserves a buffer. Spend your safety margin where a stockout costs a sale and the item is cheap and keeps:

• Over-order: napkins, sauce pots, cold cups (in warm weather), and your single busiest food box. Cheap, bulky, non-perishable, and event-day painful to run out of.
• Run lean: cutlery sets on a mostly-handheld menu, carrier bags, and any speciality box for a minor menu line. Easy to over-buy and hard to use up.
• The rule: if running out costs a sale and the leftover keeps to the next event, buy long. If leftovers just clutter the van, buy to forecast.

Weather and the printable checklist

Two realities every trader learns: weather swings your drink-to-food ratio hard, and you cannot pop to a cash and carry mid-festival. Build the checklist, price the weather in, and carry a small reserve of the cheap essentials.

Your order checklist, in sequence:

1. Set realistic covers per trading day.
2. Multiply each item by the per-100 guide, weighted to your menu.
3. Sum across all trading days.
4. Add buffers to napkins, sauce pots and cold cups.
5. Round up to case sizes.
6. Add a small van reserve of napkins and your busiest box.

Diagram coming soonA printable six-step ordering checklist — set covers, multiply by the per-100 guide, sum across days, add buffers, round to case sizes, add a van reserve.

Full event planning, from pitch layout to menu-format choices, is in our street food packaging guide.

Order it in one go

For a whole event, ordering line by line is the slow way. The Street Food Event Kit bundles the core boxes, wrapping paper, napkins, cutlery and sauce pots so a trading day is one order instead of ten — scale the kit to your covers and go. For multi-day or high-volume events, check bulk deals on the cases you buy long, like napkins, cold cups and your busiest box. Estimate your covers, run them through the tables above, and load the van knowing you will not run dry at 3pm on the busiest day.