How much liability insurance does a caterer need?

This is a hard question to answer. It very much depends on the type of event you cater and the number of catering services you provide.

For example, on a basic level, you could argue that the worst a caterer can do to someone by accident is to make them a little ill if substandard produce gets missed by you or your staff. Not very likely and not very serious. However, this needs to be balanced with the size of event you cater and so the number of repeat incidents that would come out of one unfortunate incident.

If a client was embarrassed that this happened at their event, they might be more likely to take court action, if just to make a show of passing on the blame to the caters. Defending such cases is not cheap but most public liability policies come with at least £50,000 of legal fee cover.

This can be added to by many other possible accidents. We laugh at food chains putting warnings on cups to let the good public know that coffee is hot. However this comes about because of real legal cases that they have made losses big enough to change their whole way of working on certain issues.

All caterers need top learn from this. You cannot and shouldn’t follow their big banner approach to this, but an amount of care combined with public liability cover, in case the worst happens, will ensure your business can keep trading.

If you supply marquees, tables, chairs and so on, you could also be blamed for accidents that then involve these items. Ok, it should have been obvious that that table wouldn’t support big Uncle Dave when dancing at 2am at the end of the wedding reception, but if Macdonalds’s catered weddings, they would have a maximum load sticker on each table. You haven’t, and if he argues your staff could have warned him (and most witnesses are his family, remember) then you need to be covered for all eventualities, even other people’s misjudgments.

Employers liability insurance is vital for caterers. If you ran a restaurant, you would have a comparatively stable team of chefs and waiters to do service day in, day out to a small number of customers. By comparison, a caterer needs more waiting staff to serve that many covers all at once. Because you may only do a few events a week at best, staff tend to come and go and you will nearly always have relatively new staff working on any large event. This increases the chances of accidents. Serious burns and trips in the kitchen are more common amongst caters then restaurants and the claims from injured staff are therefore much higher too.

The minimum level of cover for liability insurance is £1million. For a caterer of any decent size however, we would suggest at least £2m and preferably £5m. The difference in cost is not as much as those values suggest, as the chances of being sued for £5million is pretty slim. It is still better to be covered and it is a lot cheaper to pay insurance then it is a personal injury claim.

• For more information read the employers liability fact sheet or what is liability insurance.
• Why not try our liability insurance comparison system for tradesmen or professionals
• Help with our system can also be found in our liability insurance help menu