Gluten-Free Catering

Two orders travel under one phrase. One is a preference: somebody feels better without wheat and screens their own plate. The other is medical. With celiac disease, traces do real damage, and the person eating cannot inspect their way to safety.

Same menu, different rigor. A preference order needs gluten-free dishes on the table. A medical order needs one of them to reach one person untouched by everything else in the room. Ask which order you are placing before you call a caterer. What caterers mean by each label they use is spelled out in gluten-free office catering.

Finding gluten-free food is not the hard part. Gluten moves after the delivery arrives: on tongs, on a knife that went back into shared butter, on a counter that held flour.

• For a medical need, order that meal sealed and individually packaged, marked in the kitchen.
• Give the gluten-free trays a surface of their own, two steps off the main run.
• If it has to share the table, put it in first position, ahead of the bread and the pasta.
• Each gluten-free pan gets a serving utensil that stays in that pan.

A shared toaster is a crumb tray with a slot in it, and the office butter holds whatever the last knife carried. The same setup logic runs a nut-free catering order.

A menu tells you what a dish contains. These four tell you what happened to it.

• Is the fryer shared? Anything out of oil that also cooks breaded food comes back carrying gluten.
• What thickens the sauces and gravies? A wheat roux vanishes into a finished sauce.
• Which soy sauce is on the line? Most soy sauce is made with wheat, so ask whether tamari can stand in.
• Where does prep happen? Boards and counters that handle flour have to be separate ones, not wiped ones.

A kitchen that fills these orders often replies station by station. Vagueness is the useful signal.

Sealed individual meals come first whenever the need is medical. The meal is built away from the wheat, closed in the kitchen, and marked with a name, so nothing on your floor can change it. Packaging carries a small premium over the same food served from a pan.

Bar and bowl setups come next, where the base is already wheat-free and the gluten is one add-on you can move: rice and beans, grilled protein, corn tortillas. Mexican catering is the easiest version of that build.

Buffets come last, and only with a label at every pan. CaterAi takes the celiac count as its own line, separate from the gluten-free count, so those meals come back packaged. Other restrictions have their own pages under catering for dietary restrictions.