What corporate catering means in France
In France, corporate catering (traiteur d'entreprise) covers a narrower set of services than the word suggests in the United States or the United Kingdom. It means food composed off site and delivered to your premises ready to place on arrival, with disposable tableware and presentation included, on-site set-up optional. It does not mean cooking on site, which we do not do, and we do not provide waiting staff or bar service either: the one on-site option is buffet set-up, charged by headcount.
The second thing to know is that the French office day has its own rhythm, and catering follows it. Morning meetings open with an office breakfast of pastries, fruit and hot drinks. Mid-morning and mid-afternoon breaks are a genuine institution, not an afterthought. Lunch is a real meal, almost never a sandwich eaten at a desk, and evening events start late by British standards, usually between 18:30 and 19:30.
If you are used to booking a buffet for a room of one hundred people and expecting a chef on site, recalibrate. The standard French corporate offer is delivered ready to serve, which is faster, cheaper and far more reliable for an office environment. We do not run live stations or provide service staff; buffet set-up on site is available as an option.
The six formats you will be choosing between
Office breakfast: pastries, bread, fruit, juices and unlimited hot drinks. Used for early meetings, team kick-offs and welcoming visitors. Delivered between 07:30 and 09:30, ready to place before people arrive, on-site set-up optional.
Coffee break: hot drinks, sweet bites and fresh fruit, refreshed mid-morning and mid-afternoon. On a training day or a seminar, expect two breaks as standard rather than one.
Lunch buffet: starters, a hot dish, salads, cheese and dessert, presented on a table where guests serve themselves. This is the default for a working lunch with more than fifteen people.
Individual meal trays: a starter, a main course, cheese and a dessert in a single sealed tray. The format of choice when the meeting runs through lunch and people eat at the table where they are working.
Cocktail reception: savoury and sweet pieces designed to be eaten standing. Eight to ten pieces for a drinks reception, fourteen to eighteen when the reception replaces dinner.
Seminar package: the whole day assembled as one service, from the welcome breakfast to the closing reception, delivered slot by slot.
What a Paris quote includes, and what it does not
A quote from us includes the food, the packaging and presentation, and delivery anywhere in Île-de-France, with on-site set-up as an option. Seine-et-Marne (department 77) carries a small distance supplement, which is stated on the quote rather than hidden in the total. Everywhere else in the region, delivery is included in the price you see, set-up is an option.
Not included by default: on-site buffet set-up and high tables (above 100 guests), both quoted separately. Disposable tableware is included. We do not cook on site and do not provide waiting staff.
A detail that surprises companies arriving from outside France: our prices are net. VAT is not applicable under Article 293 B of the French General Tax Code, so there is no tax line to add on top and no gross-to-net conversion to do in your budget. The figure on the quote is the figure you pay.
Planning an event in Paris? Describe it once and get a written proposal with net prices.
Get a quote →Lead times that actually hold in Paris
Standard menus need 24 to 48 hours' notice depending on the menu. From one hundred guests, allow 48 hours, then three days from five hundred, four from a thousand, five at two thousand and a week beyond; outside Île-de-France, five days. A full seminar day follows the same scale, and booking earlier mostly secures the delivery slots.
Those lead times run in calendar hours, weekends included: what counts is the time between your order and the delivery, not the number of working days in between. Public holidays matter more in France than in many countries: May in particular is full of them, and the first fortnight of August is the quietest period of the French business year.
If you are planning from a different time zone, remember that priced proposals are prepared on Paris time: within two hours during the day, and before noon for a request sent in the evening or overnight. A request sent at 17:00 New York time is answered the next morning in Paris.
How ordering and paying works
You describe the event, you receive a written proposal with a menu, the price per guest and the total, and you sign it electronically. There is no deposit and no staged payment: the order is settled in full when you order, either by card or by bank transfer.
Payment is due in full when you order: by card straight away, or by bank transfer within three working days when the date of the event allows it. When the event is too close for a transfer to arrive in time, card is the only option offered.
Invoices are issued to your company with your legal name, address and registration number, which is what your finance team will need for an intra-community purchase. If your accounts payable process requires a purchase order number on the invoice, say so when you request the quote rather than after the invoice has been issued.
A realistic timeline for a first event
Three weeks out, fix the date, the venue and a headcount range. In Paris, the venue constraint that catches out foreign teams is building access: many office buildings require the delivery to be announced to reception in advance, and some have a service entrance that is the only usable one.
One week out, request the quote with your confirmed headcount, your dietary requirements and the exact delivery window. Two days out, confirm the final numbers. Our quotes are built on a headcount, and a group that grows from forty to fifty-five on the morning itself is the single most common cause of a buffet running short.
On the day, someone at your end needs to be reachable and physically present at the delivery time. Not a colleague who is in a meeting, and not a reception desk that closes at 12:00. That one detail determines whether the set-up is calm or improvised.