For most problems like this, it’s worth solving once or twice at small scale before you look for general solutions. How many parties have you thrown (or guided the food procurement for), and what have you found that makes for better estimation of needs?
Have you talked with caterers or other experts in such estimation? It would be interesting to learn how they decide when to risk too little vs too much, and the clever tricks they have to control consumption (which will make the estimates more accurate). For instance, having lots of cheap starches and limited meat, along with explicit or subtle rationing, can lead to high waste measured by weight or calories, but fairly low waste measured by cost.
Not sure caterers will be helpful since they’re paid for what they bring to the party and they don’t care at all whether it gets eaten or not. Similarly, the all-you-can-eat buffets have lots of data from which to estimate how much an average customer eats, and they have the law of large numbers on their side, too.
For the house parties the usual answer is just experience. After a few missteps most people can learn to have a workable idea of the amount of food needed without formulating a full Bayesian model or even without a simple spreadsheet. Of course there is some uncertainty and the incentives make the host provide the amount at the top end of the reasonable estimate interval.
For most problems like this, it’s worth solving once or twice at small scale before you look for general solutions. How many parties have you thrown (or guided the food procurement for), and what have you found that makes for better estimation of needs?
Have you talked with caterers or other experts in such estimation? It would be interesting to learn how they decide when to risk too little vs too much, and the clever tricks they have to control consumption (which will make the estimates more accurate). For instance, having lots of cheap starches and limited meat, along with explicit or subtle rationing, can lead to high waste measured by weight or calories, but fairly low waste measured by cost.
Not sure caterers will be helpful since they’re paid for what they bring to the party and they don’t care at all whether it gets eaten or not. Similarly, the all-you-can-eat buffets have lots of data from which to estimate how much an average customer eats, and they have the law of large numbers on their side, too.
For the house parties the usual answer is just experience. After a few missteps most people can learn to have a workable idea of the amount of food needed without formulating a full Bayesian model or even without a simple spreadsheet. Of course there is some uncertainty and the incentives make the host provide the amount at the top end of the reasonable estimate interval.