Cheap sweet buffet

Trixsie1989

Hi all,
We are looking at having a sweet buffet at our wedding. At the last fair we went to the proper suppliers are looking at 180-250 to do it for us. Do you think we'd be able to do this cheaper ourselves? I'm looking at catering for 80people. Mother in law is adamant we just book a cart but I'm reluctant to spend that kind of cash on sweets xxx

MILLYMOLLY

Look on Ebay for the jars and go to local wholesalers (if you have one like Makro, costco) for the sweets I would expect you can do it far cheaper. Is this as well as a traditional buffet or instead of?

I think you can hire buy the carts as well

celticcurl

You don't need to spend that sort of money - it works out at £2.50ish per guest which is ridiculous. Forget the cart and set it up on a table covered with a white tablecloth. Make a sign or bunting to hang across the front. It's a shame your in the west midlands - I hire out bowls, jars, tongs and scoops for £15! The customer then buys the sweets or chocolates that they want. As Millymolly said you can get jars on ebay - also try charity shops and places like the range/dunelm/home bargains. You can buy tongs and scoops on ebay - just be careful a lot of the scoops are really large and not only look a bit industrial but encourage people to take stupid amounts of sweets. Paper bags also on ebay but if you are going for chocolates or sticky sweets buy cellophane bags instead. Hope this helps.

Trixsie1989

Thanks guys :-) this is gonna be aswell as a traditional buffet and we are catering for 80 on that too.id thought of setting a table up and putting the sweets on there. We will also be having cupcakes on the table too that I'm making and hopefully that will cut the amount of sweets we need to buy. I've seen the packs of plastic scoops at a decent price but they come in 3 different sizes in a pack so I'd need to buy loads of packs! Any ideas where to get a good price on small scoops? My family is a bit on the greedy size so the smaller the tongs and bags the better :-) Ive seen the bags in either plain or coloured striped, do you know where I could get either some plain ones stamped or some stickers made for them? And the jars to say what the sweets are? Xxx

celticcurl

Why don't you design your own stickers on the computer and print them yourself - should be pretty straight forward with even basic computing skills.

make sure you match the size of scoop to the opening in the jar - obvious I know but you'd be surprised how many people don't think about this.

you should be able to get the scoops singularly - I suggest you do some more research. No point buying items you won't use.

themull1

I got plastic bowls from wilkinsons, plastic scoops and tongs from ebay, 30kgs sweets online for £100 all in, going to have a manzanita tree on the table and a sleigh filled with candy canes - getting married next week!

Trixsie1989

With how awful my laptop is I may have to ask a friend to make the labels for me lol had another look at scoops but no idea on sizes as they are advertised as so many ounces! 3.5oz seems to be the smallest but will keep looking. Themull1 what are your bowls like? I no I'm being fussy about having glass atm but if I could find some nice plastic ones I'd get them :-) xxx

sharnad

There are nice plastic booble topped ones for sale £1.85.

Trixsie1989

Where at? Xx

Maysie

Get some space dust in the 99p store it was very popular at ours. Also the long red liquorice twist things. We bought lots of glass bowls from charity shops. I think in the end i sold the glass bowls for about the same and slighly more than i paid for them. We had a friend with a card at a wholesalers and had a large jar of floral gums my fav. Bought good branded stuff in shops on offer and bogof.

themull1

Trixsie1989 wrote: »

With how awful my laptop is I may have to ask a friend to make the labels for me lol had another look at scoops but no idea on sizes as they are advertised as so many ounces! 3.5oz seems to be the smallest but will keep looking. Themull1 what are your bowls like? I no I'm being fussy about having glass atm but if I could find some nice plastic ones I'd get them :-) xxx

Just clear plastic bowls wider at the top than the bottom, I didn't want glass in case of any accidents, 3.5oz scoops will be fine. I didn't go for lidded glass bowls or narrow tops I thought the wide bowls would be easier for people to help themselves, I also bought a couple of pick n mix vegetarian sweet bags cos a lot of the jellies have beef gelatine in them, and I wanted my veggie friends to have a choice!



bags of sweets, cos a lot of the jellies have gelatine in.