Food tasting

Ours was free. Our venue holds a large tasting twice a year for all brides using one of their venues. They had beer, mimosas, all cake flavors, appetizers and all entrees to try. They also "include" certain stuff in each package and they had that displayed as well. It was free for 4 people anyone after that it was like $10.

My venue is also a catering company so I don't have much advice on food tastings. I've only had the one meeting for food.

For cake, I decided to live it up and try a few places. I ended up doing 4 tastings; I choose Publix. BUT I did discover some great new bakeries along the way and plan to use them for --less expensive-- needs in the future!!

My cake from Publix is right under $500 with delivery. I believe it would have been cheaper but we're outside of the delivery area. Servings for 120.

Other places acted like I was insane to want to send $500. One place quoted me $800... for practically the same cake as Publix!

Good luck!

Edit: I didn't pay for any of my tastings!

Our venue includes a private tasting for the bride and groom once we sign our contract. I think they said we can add additional people to the tasting for $20 per person.

We had a discussion about this in the vendor forum a while ago. Some places choose to charge for a tasting others will give it free but only after you have signed a contract confirming that you will be using them for your wedding.

I am guessing that this could change depending on your location/venue.

Our tasting was also included and very similar to Jenn's. It was free for me and FH (if we wanted to add more people it would have been a fee). We got to try 5 hours d'oeuvres, 2 small plates, 2 1st courses, 2 entrees, 4 desserts. They also had samples of the wedding cake (although not all the flavors, we get to do a separate tasting with the bakery this summer) and we got drinks all night.

Our tasting was free. The venue made an appoitment with us and we picked all the foods that we were interested in ahead of time and they prepared them for us and also gave us a wine and champagne tasting. The cake tasting was also at the same time and they baked 8 different cupcakes in the wedding flavors and we were able to choose from those.

We aren't using a venue, we are using a pavilion and food is seperate. If I contact the locations we were interested in for food how does that work?

Ours was kind of weird. we brought in our own catering company to the venue. we did a tasting with one company that charged us ahead of time, i think $30pp and then would take it from the final total if we went with them. however, we did not go with them so we were out $60 for mediocre food. the company we did go with did not offer a tasting until you already signed the contract and paid the deposit- but they didn't charge extra.

our bakery charged us i think $20 for various cakes, fillings and icings and then just took it from the total when we signed the contract.

There is quite a lot to wedding food tasting so perhaps reading my blog might help those of you about to go through the process http://goo.gl/3qsjBo