How Much Meat Per Person at a BBQ: 600g Raw, 480g Eaten

600 grams of raw meat per adult guest. That is the number we order against, and it is the number we would give you if you were doing the shopping yourself.

It sounds enormous written down, and that is because it is a purchasing number rather than an eating number. Meat loses weight on the way to the plate in three separate places: the butcher's trim, the bone you paid for and cannot eat, and the water and fat that leave during cooking. Across a normal mixed BBQ basket those three add up to about 20%, so 600 grams bought becomes roughly 480 grams eaten.

480 grams of cooked meat per adult, spread over four or five hours of a standing event, is a generous plate rather than a heroic one. People at a live-fire event do not eat one portion and stop. They eat a skewer while they are still saying hello, a slice of picanha when it comes off, then entrecôte, then more entrecôte, and they graze for as long as the fire is running. Catering arithmetic that assumes one sitting is how you run out at 21:30.

The other reason we publish the raw number rather than the plate number: raw is what you can verify. You can weigh what arrives from the butcher. Nobody can weigh what a guest ate.

Because yield is a property of the cut, not of the caterer. Yield is the share of what you buy that survives trim, bone and the grill. A boneless, lean, well-trimmed cut gives back almost everything. A fatty short rib on a flat bone gives back a little over half.

This is the single most useful thing to understand before you compare two quotes, because it quietly reprices the whole menu. A butcher's shelf price is per kilo bought. What matters to your event is the price per kilo eaten, and the two are only the same for a perfect cut that does not exist.

Work an example. Asado, Israeli short rib, sits on our cost sheet at ₪100 a raw kilo against entrecôte at ₪280. That looks like asado is a third of the price. But asado yields about 60% and entrecôte about 82%, so eaten, asado is ₪167 a kilo and entrecôte is ₪341. Still cheaper, but not by a third, and the gap narrows enough that the choice becomes about what the cut does at your event rather than what it does to the bill.

The same effect runs the other way at the cheap end. Chicken wings at ₪28 a kilo look like the most economical thing on any grill, and at 70% yield they cost ₪40 a kilo eaten, which they still are. Merguez at ₪75 yields 95%, so it costs ₪79 eaten. Wings are half the price of merguez on the shelf and half the price on the plate too, because for once the yields are far enough apart in the right direction.

Here is the default menu on our calculator, which is sirloin, entrecôte, pargit and merguez, worked all the way through for 50 adults. The split is 65% of the eaten weight in steak and 35% in grill items, which is not a preference so much as a fitted number: at 0.65 the model reproduces a real 50-guest butcher basket we bought to within 0.5% on cost.

Read the table as a shopping list. Each cut gets its share of the 480 grams a guest eats, then that share is divided by the cut's yield to get what has to be bought, then multiplied by the price per raw kilo.

Total for 50 guests: 27.8 kilos of raw meat and about ₪5,180 of meat, which is ₪104 of meat per guest. That number is the food, not the event. It carries no crew, no van, no charcoal, no salads, no disposables and no margin.

One thing the table does not show is a floor we apply per cut. Below about 2 kilos of a named cut across the whole event, buying it stops making sense: it runs out in the first ten minutes and that is the part guests remember. So on a small event with a long menu, the short cuts get rounded up rather than sliced thinner. A twelve-cut menu at 25 guests is a genuinely more expensive thing to buy than a four-cut one, and any caterer who prices them identically is either absorbing it or not actually buying twelve cuts.

Children count as 0.55 of an adult portion. It is the usual convention in the Israeli trade, it is a thing you as the host actually know in advance, and on a bar mitzvah with forty kids it changes the order enough to matter. Forty adults and twenty children is 51 portions, not 60, which is 30.6 kilos of raw meat instead of 36.

We apply that factor to the food and not to anything else. A child still uses a plate, a cup, a napkin and a chair, so the consumables are counted per head. Anyone who discounts a child on the disposables too is quietly taking the plates out of the order.

Vegetarians are simpler than people expect. Take them out of the meat count entirely and leave them in the head count, because the salads, the bread, the fire-roasted vegetables, the corn and the potatoes are already there at full volume for everyone. Fish eaters are their own line: we plan 300 grams of fillet per fish eater rather than 480, because a fish eater at a live-fire event eats a fillet and more of the sides, and 300 grams of fillet is already a full plate.

The one adjustment we will not make is the portion size itself. Grams are an operator's unit. A client cannot tell whether 480 grams is generous or thin, so offering a weight slider gives you no real information and turns into a price control whose only comfortable direction is down. Running out of meat is the one failure at a BBQ that nothing recovers, so the portion stays fixed and the head count is what moves.

Two honest answers, because there are two different questions hiding in that search.

If you mean the meat, the default 50-guest menu above is ₪104 a guest. Swap the entrecôte for picanha and it drops by about ₪24. Build a menu out of tomahawk and it climbs past ₪150 on the meat line alone, because a 70% yield means you buy 143 grams for every 100 you serve.

If you mean the bill, ours starts at ₪290 per guest all-inclusive, with a floor of ₪6,700 per event and a minimum of 20 guests. That ₪290 covers the meat plus the things the meat quietly needs: salads at ₪7.50 a guest, disposables at ₪15.96, hot sides at ₪4.20, soft drinks at ₪4.20, bread at ₪3.30, sauces at ₪1.50 and ₪150 of charcoal across the event, then the crew, the van, the insurance and the margin. Alcohol and dessert are not in it and are quoted separately, because at roughly ₪45 a guest of cost the alcohol line is too big to hide inside a headline number.

The disposables figure is worth dwelling on, because it is the one every DIY plan gets wrong. ₪15.96 a guest assumes four plates, four cups, two sets of cutlery and six napkins per person, then a 30% buffer. That is what a four-to-six hour standing event consumes. A one-plate-per-guest assumption is a seated dinner, and it is off by a factor of four.

The ₪290 is a floor rather than a rate card. A richer menu prices above it, and a cheaper menu does not price below it, so choosing generous cuts at 25 guests cannot be used to spend our margin. Put your real numbers into the calculator on the homepage and it will show you where your event actually lands.

Then take the same three steps and stop reading price-per-kilo labels as if they were the answer.

First, decide the head count in portions: adults at 1, children at 0.55, vegetarians out of the meat count. Second, multiply by 600 grams to get the raw weight you need in total. Third, split that weight across your cuts and correct each one for yield, which means buying more of anything with a bone or a heavy fat cap. If short rib or wings are on your list, add about 40% to what your eating estimate suggested for those lines specifically.

Then call a real butcher rather than a supermarket counter, because at 30 kilos you are a trade order and should be treated like one. The kosher butchers on our own list sit across Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Givatayim, Kfar Saba, Ra'anana, Herzliya, Netanya, Holon, Bat Yam and Petach Tikva. Two we have checked the paperwork on ourselves: Atliz Lemhadrin in Tel Aviv, which holds Badatz certification from Machpud, Beit Yosef and the Eda HaChareidis with a supervisor on the premises, and Arbi'z in Ra'anana, certified by the local Ra'anana Rabbanut with a named mashgiach on site. For the others we have the shop and not the teudah, and we are not going to print a hechsher we have not seen. Ask the certification question directly, ask to see the teudah, and check the branch rather than the brand, because kosher status is a thing to confirm rather than assume.

Two things to budget for that the meat weight will not tell you. Vacuum-packed trade cuts come with order minimums, so a long menu means buying more of the tail cuts than you will use. And charcoal for a real event is not two supermarket bags: we run ₪150 of it across a single evening.