Catering Insurance: Liability, Cost & Quotes From $5

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Whether you run a B&B, restaurant, coffee shop or a grocery store, selling or serving food opens you up to a lot of liability. Running a catering business is no exception to this rule. In this guide, we’re going to explore the different kinds and forms of catering insurance for events of different types,  take a look at the average catering insurance cost, take a look at some of the best catering insurance companies and help you compare catering business insurance quotes online from them and other great providers of business insurance for caterers.

Let's serve the main course, shall we?

Catering Liability Insurance

When shopping for catering liability insurance, you’ll typically find it is often offered as a part of either restaurant insurance or small business insurance, depending on the specifics of your catering business. In most cases, catering businesses get general liability insurance first and foremost, which protects them from a wide range of damages.

For example, if you end up causing property damage while you’re serving your catered food, you’ll be covered from getting charged for it. More importantly, your catering business will be protected from damages incurred by causing bodily injury to others, including the people consuming your food, your customers.

While no catering business would ever willingly serve people contaminated or undercooked food, there’s always a chance that one of your clients contracts food poisoning. Liability insurance will ensure that you don’t end up paying out a hefty settlement because of it.

General liability insurance for catering business tends to hover at around $37 per month or about $444 per year, which is on the cheaper and more reasonable end of the business insurance scale.

Catering Insurance Cost

As you may have guessed throughout this guide, the cost of insurance for catering company clients tends to depend on a wide range of factors. Including whether you’re catering to someone’s home or catering for an event, your insurance company will also look at your history as a caterer.

For example, if you’re a new and unproven caterer, then you’ll likely have to deal with high rates for the first couple of years that you spend working with your insurance company. This is because there simply won’t be enough of a history for your carrier to make an educated guess as to whether or not you will be a risk to work with.

The cost of a catering insurance policy will also depend on how long you’re getting the coverage for. If you’re only getting insurance for a day or a couple of events, then your overall costs will be cheap, but the cost of insurance per day will be higher than if you had opted for a typical monthly policy.

That said and as previously mentioned in the guide, the average cost of general liability insurance for catering business is around $37 per month or about $444 per year, and may start from around $27 a month for smaller caterers.

We’ve gone ahead and gathered a catering insurance quote from some of the most popular catering insurance companies in this section of our guide so you can have a better idea of the average cost. These policies all feature at least some form of general liability coverage, and the quotes are for a medium-sized catering company with a good record.

Single Event Catering Insurance

Along with monthly and yearly catering insurance, you can also get insured for a single event. This can range from catering insurance for a day for an event that lasts less than 24 hours to multi-day insurance policies that will allow you to attend multi-day events without having to purchase a longer policy.

Keep in mind that single event catering insurance tends to be a lot more expensive per day than a complete policy. These kinds of insurance policies are typically only worth it if you’re going to attend one or two events per year because anything more will start costing you as much as a full-fledged policy.

Catering Insurance One Day

You can purchase catering insurance for a single day and even for a few hours from some companies like Thimble, who offer more flexible catering insurance options. As with event insurance for catering, these policies will tend to cost more per day than longer policies, so be sure to compare the price of one-day coverage with longer coverage options.

Another thing to keep in mind is that not all insurance companies will even offer one-day options, so be sure to find out if yours does. Some of the cheapest one-day catering insurance policies go for as much as $20 per day, so you’ll be paying nearly half as much as you would for a full month of coverage under a longer policy.

Event Catering Insurance

Compared to other forms of catering insurance, event catering insurance can sometimes be a little more expensive, especially depending on the premises on which the event is held. For example, if your event is being hosted in a lavish banquet hall, then insurance will be more expensive because of the higher cost of repairing potential property damage.

Event catering insurance also tends to have higher prices because of the larger number of people who might attend the event. Having more people at an event means that there are more people who may end up getting sick after the meal, increasing the risk that the insurer takes when covering you.

Home Catering Insurance

While there is no specific policy for home caterers, if you explain that you’re a home catering business to your insurance provider/agent, then you may get a discount on your policy and have a a cheaper business insurance quote. This is because you’ll have no commercial property to insure and will typically spend less time on the premises, making it a little less risky to cover you when it comes to the property damage component of your policy.