Any tips/advice for making drop-off catering work?

Our venue did all of the catering we had a Japanese hibachi buffet for dinner and to keep with that theme they allowed us to bring in our own sushi from our favorite local restaurant since they don't have sushi chefs who work at our reception venue. They dropped off 200 pieces of sushi, 5 or 6 different kinds, some edammame, and champagne. With something as dangerous as fresh seafood it was critical that the restaurant we were working with could deliver everything in a very limited amount of travel time, in the properly cold temperatures and not too early before our guests would arrive at the reception location and everything had to be eaten before the wedding party arrived. Of course I wasn't there so I didn't actually see how smooth the delivery process went over, but I do know that our venue and the restaurant were both people that we trusted and they were both aware of each other's plans. Luckily storage arrangements didn't have to be worked out. All of our guests loved the authenticity of our food and no one was sick and DH and I got a great deal since the owners of the restaurant are personal friends of ours, so it was a win-win. Good luck!

Hire staff to help on the day.

My sister had a restaurant cater. so it was kind of a drop off but the restaurant staff stayed to serve the buffet. can yours do that? if not, i'd look into hiring 2-3 people.

Also, my sister didn't have any plan for the cake and when i realized this, as a BM I jumped in, grabbed a few kids and started cutting and serving. if you are on a really tight budget you can ask close family or friends to help, but you'll need to make sure they are really okay with this and understand fully what each person is expected to do.

Our caterer just dropped off. My aunts and uncles stayed on top of replenishing food, cutting cake, etc. We only had 50 guests, so it was not very labor intensive.

Hire some people to take care of it. It will become a nightmare for me really fast if I had to replenish food or cut cake in my dress. Just something to think about.

I would recommend hire friends of your siblings that they trust. For my wedding I'm doing catering that will be dropped off and I asked my brother if he had some close friends that wanted to make 80 bucks for the night. That was an easy sale. These friends will also be in charge of the beer and wine bar.

This is where a good DOC can come in handy. If you don't want to hire one then you can designate friends or family to help out. If worse comes to worse you can hire servers pretty cheap from the local colleges. They are always looking to make extra money

What ^^^they^^^ said. Ask some young adults they'll do it for cheap (in this case the earlier the reception the better). Side note make sure you provide them w/ gloves and dont do cheap get good trash bags & containers for transporting the food from storage to service table.

I think you're right: getting catering put together is not easy, but it's worth the time and effort. Especially for a wedding! I think that doing something creative is a great way to shake things up. You can sometimes get away with spending less money if you do something non-traditional. Thanks for sharing! http://www.hegedornsmarket.com/catering.asp

Hiring someone to do the work for you is 100% worth the cost. You don't want to be stressing out over the food on your big day. I know that it's tempting to save money, but save it somewhere else, and splurge here. It'll be worth it to have someone dealing with keeping the food warm and flowing. http://www.redpearcatering.com.au/corporate.html