Guide

How to collect meal choices with your RSVP

How to ask for meal choices and dietary needs at RSVP time, keep answers tied to each guest, and hand your caterer a headcount they can cook from.

Meal choices are where a tidy guest list falls apart. The yes-or-no answer is easy. The moment you need to know that the Khan household is four people, two of whom want the chicken, one of whom is vegetarian and one of whom has a nut allergy, a simple reply form stops being enough.

The rule that fixes most of it

Ask per person, not per invitation. A household replies once, but a caterer cooks per head. If your form collects one meal choice for a party of four, you have collected a quarter of the information and you will spend the next fortnight in individual text conversations recovering the rest.

Good forms expand: the guest confirms how many are coming, and the meal question repeats for each attendee, with a name field so the answer stays attached to a person. That matters far more at the seating stage than it seems now.

Three questions, and no more

Every extra question costs you responses. Three is usually the ceiling for a celebration:

1. Main course choice, as a short list of named options. Two or three choices, not six. Most caterers price a limited menu better anyway.
2. Dietary requirement, as a short list plus an "other" box: vegetarian, vegan, halal, gluten free, other.
3. Allergies, as free text, and worded as a safety question rather than a preference. "Any allergies we must know about?" gets more careful answers than "dietary notes".

Keep the allergy question separate from the dietary one. They are different problems with different consequences, and guests who merge them will write "no nuts" in a box labelled preferences and assume you understood it as medical.

Naming the options properly

"Chicken, beef or vegetarian" is not enough for a guest deciding on a phone screen. Give a one-line description, because an unappealing label pushes people to the safe option and skews your counts:

• Roast chicken with saffron rice
• Slow-braised beef with root vegetables
• Aubergine and chickpea tagine (vegan)
• Children's plate (for under 12s)

Mark the vegan and children options explicitly. A surprising share of your vegetarian count comes from people who simply could not tell which option was safe.

Timing it against the caterer, not against your nerves

Work backwards. Ask the caterer for the date the numbers lock, subtract a week for chasing, and make that your RSVP deadline. Then say the reason in the invitation itself: "Please reply by 4 August so we can confirm numbers with our caterer" performs noticeably better than a bare date, because it turns your deadline into someone else's rule.

Handling the answers you never get

Some guests will confirm attendance and skip the meal question. Decide a default in advance and apply it consistently: usually the vegetarian or most widely acceptable option, since an unexpected vegetarian plate is a smaller failure than an unexpected meat one. Chase the allergy question specifically, by name, because that is the only one where a missing answer is a real risk.

What to hand over

One sheet: adult count, child count, a line per meal option with its total, and an allergy list with guest names beside each entry. Mark any assumed counts as assumptions. Send the same sheet to the venue if seating is involved, because a nut allergy matters at the table as well as in the kitchen.

Which platforms can actually do this

• Greenvelope includes custom RSVP questions, meal preferences and dietary notes at every paid tier, priced per mailing from $19 for up to 20 guests and $99 for up to 100.
• Zola includes custom RSVP questions such as meal choice on its free tier, though it does not offer digital invitations, only digital save the dates.
• Mixily supports custom RSVP questions for meal choice and dietary needs on every plan, with the free plan capped at 50 invites and 40 RSVPs.
• Facebook Events cannot do this at all. Responses are fixed to Going, Maybe or Cannot Go, with no mechanism for per-guest questions, so meal choices end up in the comments.
• Google Forms handles the questions beautifully and has no guest list, so you get answers with no way to know who has not answered.

The Greenvelope and Zola comparison is a useful read if you are deciding between paying per mailing for depth and using a free wedding platform.

Doing it free

Dawat gives every guest a personally addressed link and up to five custom RSVP questions, so meal choice, dietary requirement and allergies arrive attached to the right name rather than to a household. Free at every guest count, no per-recipient charge, and guests never create an account to answer. Set your questions up now and let the counts build themselves.

Create your invitation — free →Unlimited guests. No card required.

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