Catering Contracts and Tenders

Catering procurement is led by school meals: academy trusts and individual schools tendering their catering service. University, hospital, police and workplace catering, café and catering concessions at venues and visitor sites, event catering, and the supply and repair of catering equipment also come up.

Stotles brings together catering tenders and contracts from 100+ portals into one search, so you do not have to check each portal separately, and you can set alerts for new opportunities across the UK and Ireland.

If you want to search the government portals directly, Find a Tender carries higher-value contracts across the UK and Contracts Finder carries lower-value contracts in England. Public Contracts Scotland, Sell2Wales and eTendersNI cover Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Ireland's eTenders covers Irish public bodies, and many councils, NHS bodies and housing associations publish on their own e-tendering portals such as ProContract. Most school catering tenders appear on Find a Tender, and smaller school contracts sometimes appear only on a trust's own portal.

School catering tenders are scored on food quality and menus, nutrition, how the caterer will increase meal uptake, allergen management, staffing and the price per meal. Most include a site visit and a tasting or presentation stage, and contracts are often timed to start at the beginning of a term.

Caterers must be registered as a food business with their local council and meet food hygiene law, and school caterers must serve meals that meet the school food standards. Tenders usually set minimum insurance cover, check financial standing and ask for evidence of similar contracts at selection stage. Under the Procurement Act 2023, suppliers can be excluded for certain criminal convictions, insolvency or failure to pay tax.

Outsourced catering is bought through the ESPO catering services framework, the CPC outsourced catering services framework and the YPO building in use support services dynamic purchasing system. ESPO's framework has separate lots for education, social care and other public sector buyers, and housing associations and school groups have run further competitions under it. CPC's framework is called off by colleges and academy trusts, often through a mini-competition.

YPO's support services system has a catering services lot used by police forces and multi-academy trusts. For food supplied into in-house kitchens rather than a managed service, academy trusts and councils also use the YPO UK Food Deal dynamic purchasing system.

Academy trusts and individual schools tender their own catering, often grouping several schools into one contract, and some appoint a procurement adviser to run the tender for them. Councils still buy school meals for the schools they maintain in some areas.

Public sector catering contracts most often run for around three years, with some extending to five. Event catering and one-off hospitality contracts are much shorter.

Track the expiry dates of existing school and trust catering contracts, academy trust board minutes and preliminary market engagement notices, which show catering work coming due ahead of a notice. On Stotles you can track those signals and the buyers behind them, then follow a notice from pre-tender through to award.

The core codes are 55524000 (School catering services), 55520000 (Catering services) and 15894210 (School meals), alongside 55500000 (Canteen and catering services) and 55320000 (Meal-serving services).