What a catering workflow costs: the Taste & Thyme teardown

Most pages that answer "what does a catering workflow cost" give you a slider: pick a team size, pick a wage, get a number nobody can check. This page does the opposite. It takes one workflow that has already been priced in public — the weekly catering operations workflow in the Taste & Thyme Catering sample plan published on this site — and pulls it apart line by line: where the time goes, what each block costs, which problems sit inside it, and what the fixes named for those problems cost. Taste & Thyme is a synthetic example, labelled as such on the sample plan itself, so every figure below can be checked against the published sample and the published catalog. Nothing here is a measurement of a real business.

The total, before anything is fixed

The workflow runs from a booking coming in to the event being staffed, the food being ordered, and the invoice going out. Priced from the hours and rates stated in the sample, it takes 18.62 hours a week and costs $722.31 a week, which is $37,560 a year. That is the whole finding in one line, and it is also the least useful form of it. A total on its own tells an owner the workflow is heavy. It does not say where the weight is, and it cannot be argued with. The blocks underneath it can.

Where the time goes, block by block

The sample prices the workflow in four blocks of work, each with its own hours, pace, and rate:

• The owner's own work — 5 hours a week at $60 an hour. That is $300 a week, and $15,600 a year.
• Event coordination — 12 hours a week at $30 an hour. That is $360 a week, and $18,720 a year.
• Kitchen deep-clean coordination — 2 times a month, 2.5 hours each time, at $30 an hour. Spread across the weeks of a year, that is $34.62 a week, and $1,800 a year.
• Kitchen equipment servicing — 1 time a quarter, 6 hours each time, at $60 an hour. Spread the same way, that is $27.69 a week, and $1,440 a year.

Add the weekly lines and you get the total above: the two weekly blocks do almost all of it, and the two jobs that happen a few times a month or a few times a year are small lines that are easy to forget exist until you write them down. That shape is worth noticing because it is the usual one: the cost of a manual workflow is rarely one big leak. It is two steady blocks of weekly time, plus small recurring jobs nobody thinks of as a cost at all.

The four problems, in the business's own words

Inside those blocks, the sample names four problems, written the way the business talks about them:

• Double-booked Saturdays, because the booking record lives in a spreadsheet and on a paper calendar, and the two drift apart.
• Ordering from memory, which produces ingredient shortages on some days and overbuys on others.
• Group-text shift swaps that never reach the event sheet, so the sheet the team works from on the day is not the schedule they agreed.
• Invoices retyped by hand, and deposits nobody tracks, in the workflow's own records.

One honesty note about these four: the sample does not break out a separate cost for each problem, and this teardown does not invent one. The problems sit inside the blocks above — a double-booked Saturday is born in the coordination work, the retyping sits inside the weekly hours — but the published figures price the blocks, not the problems. Putting a tidy dollar figure on each problem would mean splitting blocks by a guess, and a teardown that guesses at the exact point it claims to be precise is worse than one that says where its numbers stop. What can be priced exactly is the other side of the comparison: what a named fix costs.

What the named fixes cost

The sample plan names a fix for each problem, and the plan catalog this studio publishes lists a price for each tool it names:

• For the double-booked Saturdays, the sample's detailed recommendation is one shared booking record: Tripleseat as the single booking record, listed at $4,500 a year, with Google Calendar connected, listed at $0 a year. The sample plan card also names Acuity Scheduling, listed at $192 a year, to catch Saturday conflicts.
• For ordering from memory, the sample names MarketMan, listed at $2,988 a year.
• For the group-text swaps, the sample names Slack, listed at $87 a year, together with the same Tripleseat record above, so shift changes land on the event sheet instead of in a chat thread.
• For the retyped invoices and untracked deposits, the sample names QuickBooks Online, listed at $456 a year, together with Stripe. The catalog lists Stripe as pay-as-you-go and gives it no annual price, so this teardown gives it none either.

Add the priced tools the sample names — Tripleseat, Google Calendar, Acuity Scheduling, MarketMan, Slack, and QuickBooks Online — and they come to $8,223 a year. Put that next to the workflow's own cost, $37,560 a year, and you have the only comparison this page will make: the fixes have a published price, the workflow has a worked-out cost, and whether any one fix is worth its price depends on how much of the block it touches is really caused by the problem it addresses. That last judgement is the owner's, and it is exactly the judgement a block-by-block teardown makes possible. A slider average cannot make it at all.

What this teardown does not claim

It does not claim any of these fixes will save a particular amount of time or money. It does not claim a real catering business spends this much — Taste & Thyme is a worked example, built so the arithmetic can be inspected. And it does not price problems the sample did not price. What it shows is a method any owner can hold up against their own week: write the blocks, attach the hours and the rates, add it up, name the problems in your own words, and put a fix's published price next to the cost of the blocks it touches. The method guide in these Notes, "How to audit one workflow", walks through doing exactly that on a workflow of your own, and the cost guide, "What a workflow audit costs in 2026", lays out what it costs to have someone else do it.

Doing this with Where AI Fits

Where AI Fits produces this teardown for one of your workflows: a guided conversation reconstructs the workflow, you confirm the steps, the hours, and the rates, and the paid AI Integration Plan, at $49, writes up the time and cost block by block, names the problems, and puts a named fix and its catalog price next to each one. The sample plan this teardown is built from is published on this site, so you can read the finished document — and check every number on this page against it — before deciding.

Sources

Every number in this teardown traces to the studio's own published sample or catalog, checked on 2026-10-29. Taste & Thyme Catering is a synthetic example, labelled as such on the sample plan itself; its figures are the sample's own, not measurements of a real business.

• Taste & Thyme Catering sample plan — $722.31 a week, $37,560 a year, 18.62 hours a week, the four named problems, and the sample's recommendations — https://www.agenticartists.com/products/where-ai-fits/sample-plan — checked 2026-10-29
• Where AI Fits plan catalog prices, as published in the shipped catalog — Tripleseat $4,500 a year, Google Calendar $0 a year, Acuity Scheduling $192 a year, MarketMan $2,988 a year, Slack $87 a year, QuickBooks Online $456 a year; Stripe listed as pay-as-you-go with no annual price — checked against the catalog on 2026-10-29
• Where AI Fits — $49 for the AI Integration Plan for one workflow, published on this site at /products/where-ai-fits — checked 2026-10-29

Back to Notes