The question comes in most weeks, usually the night before a job: how many trays for 100 pax? The honest answer is that headcount alone won't tell you. What decides it is how many dishes you're running, because a buffet is portioned per dish, not per person.
Start from dishes, not people
One Self-Heating Food Tray Set · 4000ml holds 4000ml and serves 8–10 pax of a single dish — that is 8–10 people taking a full portion of that one dish. Nobody does that at a buffet with five dishes on the line, which is where the arithmetic gets interesting.
What a guest actually eats is roughly one full portion's worth in total on a three-dish spread, rising to about one and a half when there are five dishes to try. More choice means people take a bit more overall — but nowhere near a full portion of each. So the sum is total food across the line, not dishes multiplied by headcount, and that is what the table below gives you.
| Pax | 3 hot dishes | 4 hot dishes | 5 hot dishes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
| 50 | 6 | 8 | 10 |
| 80 | 9 | 12 | 15 |
| 100 | 12 | 15 | 19 |
| 150 | 17 | 23 | 28 |
| 200 | 23 | 30 | 38 |
Round up, never down. A tray that runs out at minute forty is the thing guests remember, and you can't top up a flameless tray mid-service without opening it and losing the heat you paid for.
Where the price breaks fall
Our tiers step at 4, 10, 30 and 90 pieces. The 4000ml tray runs $7.90 each from 4 pieces, $7.70 from 10, $7.50 from 30, and $7.30 from 90. Minimum order is 4.
Worth knowing if you're near a break: a 100-pax job on four dishes needs 15 trays, which sits in the $7.70 band. Order 30 and you drop to $7.50 — the extra fifteen trays cost $112.50, and they don't expire. If you cater twice a month, you've already used them.
Don't buy to the next tier if you cater occasionally. Trays take real shelf space — each one is 40.5 × 28 × 12 cm — and a box of forty in a storeroom is forty trays of rent.
Count the heat packs separately
Each 4000ml tray takes 2 × 90g heat pads and a water pack, and the set ships with them. If you're reordering consumables for trays you already own, that's the number that matters: two pads per tray, per service. They're single use.
Heat packs price at $1.80 each from 10 pieces, down to $1.50 from 200. For a caterer doing 100-pax jobs regularly, 200 pads is roughly six or seven events' worth.
The two mistakes that cost the most
- Ordering by headcount and forgetting dish count. This is the big one. Five dishes for 80 pax is 15 trays, not 8 — people plan the spread and then buy for the room.
- Buying trays without checking lift access and table length. A 40.5 × 28 cm footprint across fifteen trays is over four metres of table once you leave room to serve. Void deck events are where this bites.
When a self-heating tray is the wrong tool
If you're serving in a venue with a working kitchen and power, a chafing dish is cheaper per event and you're not throwing anything away afterwards. Self-heating earns its price where there's no power point and no flame allowed — void decks, offices, outdoor sites, anywhere the building management says no to butane.
And if you're plating individual meals rather than running a buffet line, skip trays entirely. A bento set is the right shape for that job and you won't be paying for 4000ml of capacity you then portion out by hand.