First, you're sure you will have enough volunteers to help with the set-up, cooking, serving and cleaning? If so, then continue to look for deals.

Otherwise, is there a local restaurant that would consider catering this event? They would have access to the best bulk prices of the foods you serve. I help organize an annual event and we found it just easier to have it catered.

If not, then perhaps still contact your local breakfast diners, etc., to see if they can either donate food items or get them for you at their costs.

Yep - plenty of volunteers. This effort consists of several different teams -- all in all, we've got at least 50 folks, and a number have already stepped up to the plate to volunteer. I had briefly considered outside catering, but just worry that our returns will be diminished. Too, we are trying to heighten awareness of the "hands on" aspects of what our teams do, and l think having us cook, serve, and clean up will be somewhat demonstrative. Good idea to contact local restaurants for donations/discounted supplies. I had been focusing only on grocery stores, but places that serve breakfast might be a good bet.

You could try a restaurant supplier, too to see if they could give you a good deal. Instead of driving around to different stores and looking at the shelves, I would try and speak with the managers and see if they can do something special for you.

For topping ideas: Mini chocolate chips, chopped nuts, whipped cream, strawberry sauce, apple pie filling, etc.

Is this the first pancake fundraiser at your church? If not, I would contact the other groups that have had one to get some advice. Or I would google "pancake supper", see who else has had one in your town and figure out if I had any contacts there. Your contacts might be able to give out of the box suggestions for donations. Local food vendors, non food businesses, families, etc. have all donated to fundraisers I have been involved in. The trick is knowing who to ask.

Edited to add - is there a Mom's or women's group at your church that would be willing to make baked goods that could be sold from a separate table?

Someone close to me has been involved in a fundraising (spaghetti) dinner for many years. He puts in a lot of time to secure money and product donations -- since Fat Tuesday is in less than a month, I would definitely solicit help and develop a plan about who to reach out to and how. The message is as important as the reach.

I can understand why some businesses wouldn't support travel expenses-- perhaps you can create a separate fund or bucket solely for supplementing those who can't afford the trip.

Can you purchase pre-cooked bacon in bulk? Precooked seems like a pretty big expenditure. If you have a kitchen available, you may want to check other options. You can bake bacon on large pans-- but most pancake events here offer sausage. I am guessing because it's cheaper? (I don't really know-- I so rarely buy either bacon or sausage).

While I love the idea of a toppings bar for a small party or gathering, it might create a bottleneck (and huge mess) if your expected crowd is large. Also, the types of things I'd imagine (fruit syrups, bananas and berries, toasted pecans cinnamon drizzle) can be budget busters. Maybe choose one or two options-- pancakes and syrup or pancakes with whatever berries you can get at a great price. Of course, all that changes if you get the products donated!

There are several organizations that hold pancake breakfasts in our town and in our small community each year. I don't know the details, but I do know they keep the menu very simple. No toppings other than individual containers of whipped butter and syrup (regular and sugar-free). They serve sausage patties only (although I would LOVE having bacon as an option) and several drinks (OJ, apple juice, milk) and of course coffee. One breakfast is 'all-you-can-eat' and the servers come around with platters of pancakes and sausage and will give you more if you want them.

I do know that our Costco has some excellent pre-made sausage patties in their frozen section. I can't recall the brand off the top of my head, but I bought some for our family Christmas brunch at the recommendation of my brother (who is pretty discriminating), and they were really good. I pre-cooked them the night before and warmed them up the next morning.

Contact other churches in the area and see how they do this. I know our church has one each year - sure there will be churches in your area.

Gah. Having flashbacks from my mom making me work I mean me volunteering against my will to work the church's Shrove Tuesday pancake supper as a kid...they always had ham, no bacon or sausage. I think I would have remembered bacon or sausage...

You should visit the cooking forum here. There are people there who do
this sort of stuff regularly and they might have some tips.

I would consider actually cooking sausage links as the aroma is a large part of taste and enticement. Easy enough to brown links on griddles. However, precooked bacon would be easy but cooking bacon, again, the aroma, isn't hard but sausage is easier. I would not have toppings other than syrup, butter and if you want to get fancy, lemon curd. It's breakfast not dessert.

We've had these events in the past, hosted by a different group, and initially I thought that our efforts might be reinventing the wheel. I've spoken with a leader who has told me, however, that the wheel was never really invented in the first place and we will want to proceed as though this event is the first of its kind.

Good idea to consider having some home-baked goods on hand to sell. I feel confident we could get some donations from team or congregation members. I've seen that done at a different type of fundraiser and it was a success. Too, someone may want a little more to eat after having pancakes and bacon for supper, and this would give them the opportunity to buy a brownie or something.

I wouldn't mind coming up with "one more thing" to go on the plates though. We have a full kitchen and will have a serving line so that we'll be able to control how much food goes on each plate. (I can just imagine bacon lovers who would swarm the stuff if we let them serve themselves, so that ain't happenin'! ;-)) I am concerned that we give a good value for the money we're charging per ticket, though. I'm just not sure what else we could add to the menu.

Perhaps a topping bar is not a good idea, as has been stated above it could cause a bottleneck and I can see how that might get messy quickly. We might offer individual plastic cups of cut strawberries, chocolate chips, whipped cream, and maybe have some shakers of powdered sugar available at the end of the serving line. Our campus is nut-free due to requirements of the in-house preschool.

Thanks so much for your thoughts. You've given me quite a few more things to consider, and the more I consider the more I think of other things. (Tablecloths! ... Perhaps inexpensive, colorful plastic ones that would embody both the Panamanian and Mardi Gras spirit.)

I recently went to a spaghetti dinner fundraiser and aside from having whole pies/brownies/cakes for sale, also offered individual slices. Worked well since we could buy a few of each, and not be stuck with a whole pie.

Little tip:if putting out butter for the panakes, slice small 'pats' inspead of putting out whole sticks.

Good luck Jen.

One thing you might consider as an alternative topping, would be something like turkey gravy. It's a big hit in my family around the holidays, as weird as it might sound: pancakes and turkey gravy for Christmas breakfast. Maybe commercially available wouldn't be as good, though. Sausage gravy?

For a plate filler, if it wouldn't be too labor intensive (but could be done ahead on sheet pans and reheated), one idea would be baked apples...cut in half before baking, scoop out the core (I use grapefruit spoons) sprinkle on some brown sugar and cinnamon with a little butter and lemon juice.

GFS, if you have one, for pancake mix, syrup, and precooked sausage. We don't do bacon because of the cooking being done in a school.

Little tip:if putting out butter for the panakes, slice small 'pats' inspead of putting out whole sticks.

And you'll want to have a gameplan for controlling the bacon lovers. ;-)

Something that always sell are muffins. The trick is to label and promote them as ' while you're here pick-up tomorrow's breakfast '.

This may not work if your church fasts on Ash Wednesday.

Our Church has a pancake dinner every year to raise funds for it's private school. The whole town turns out whether they go to the Church or not.

The first time I went I was blown away a how darn good the pancakes were! I wanted the recipe and was told they used Bisquick. Our Bisquick pancakes don't turn out as good as theirs though. I think the key is adding a bit more liquid to the mix so the pancakes will be a tad thinner. Bisquick isn't expensive at all. OR, you can search the internet for a recipe and have someone test it out, and if it's good then make a large batch to serve later.

Have you thought about link sausage along with bacon?

Adding a fruit or a simple fruit salad is all you need to complete the dinner.

Thanks to all of your very helpful suggestions, I've composed an email to two of my team leaders and have offered a comprehensive proposal on how to proceed. I'm feeling a lot more confident than I was when I first started looking at this. Sometimes it helps just to "talk things out", obtain some new ideas, and organize thoughts into an outline, which is what I've done. I'm going to ask for a persuasive volunteer to hit up various outlets for donations of supplies. I think that's a good approach to take, but I don't really want to do it myself. I figure there are people who are excellent at that sort of thing, whereas I prefer to work "behind the scenes". ;-)

I greatly appreciate the input! Thanks again!

You cold ask restaurants in your town to donate a small amount of their specialty in exchange for featuring their name and location prominently, both next to the food and on a large sign.

I also am on the organizing committee for a fundraiser which gets 1000+ people to the event. There's a very limited menu, but with something for the vegans and gluten free people to eat. The main food and beverages have servers, desserts are out there for the taking. The key is having enough food lines to accommodate the crowd. Also enough seating.

This might be too late at this point but our Catholic Highschool solicits monetary donations to buy supplies from local businesses. They then print the business logos on the paper place mats.

The best way to make money on this event is to have other ways for people to spend their money, such as a raffle. Perhaps some gift baskets to raffle off. You will make a lot more on items like this than saving a few dollars here and there on less expensive food and paper items.

If this is the first time for doing this and you have just over three weeks to organize and pull it off, limit what you do so that you can be sure to do it well. . Keep it simpler and you will be more successful and be able to build in the future.

It sounds like you are responsible for getting pricing for the groceries, but also at least to some degree determining the menu and what those groceries will be. Pancakes, butter and syrup are given. Do you want to provide vegan or GF options or figure that GF folks will expect pancakes not to be their thing and be satisfied with generic pancakes being vegetarian? If you do decide to provide GF and/or vegan options, I would say so on any publicity for the event.

Since it is a dinner, you could consider adding eggs for more protein/substance, and it could be a GF option. Scrambled are easiest -- and you may be buying eggs for the pancakes. Bacon is great, but it is harder to cook a lot of it to correct doneness and it is messier. Sausage or ham are easier to deal with for crowds.

Since this is Shrove Tuesday aka Fat Tuesday, it might be fun to have whipped cream, chocolate chips and some berries. The baked apples sound good too, but both of these could reduce baked good sales if you want to add the bake sale on the side. Decide whether you would rather have just the dinner and both provide and charge a bit more or do the bake sale.

I have also seen dessert auctions where towards the end of the meal, people bid on a whole cake or pie. This works best with family events where folks tend to come for the entire event rather than just come, eat and go. You could adapt the idea to coffee cakes, muffins and other take home items since many will have had all the sweet they can handle with pancakes and syrup -- with or without whipped cream, etc.

You can do some pricing online. Sam's allows you to shop online and pick up at the warehouse, so you should be able to shop and price their options online. I think Walmart does also, though not all items may be in stock at the stores, so you might have to order in advance. Costco has different pricing online and I'm not sure they have the same order and pick up. They also don't typically give prices over the phone.

If you were starting 6 months out, you could do a lot more research (mixes, scratch recipes, stores, etc. -- and maybe drive yourself nuts with it all, but given what you said about Krusteaz, I decided to take a look. Interestingly, Sam's and Walmart both have Krusteaz Buttermilk complete 10 lb bags with pricing shown online -- and Walmart runs slightly cheaper than Sam's -- about $7.50 vs $8. The info says that makes 240 pancakes (not what size) and all you add is water -- so that is your total cost for pancakes. The nutritional info says 90 servings per bag -- I'd guess you might do larger pancakes for dinner and maybe serrve as few as 50 guests peer bag -- but that's still 15 cents per person. And Krusteaz will reimburse half of that? I would go buy a smaller box of the mix and make a test batch this weekend. If you are happy with them, I'd stop worrying about the pancakes and move on. You can hardly make it easier or cheaper than that. Move on to sausage or ham, syrup, butter, plates, napkins, forks and knives and beverage options (since it's dinnerr, you can get away with iced tea, lemonade and water -- maybe add coffee) then decide if you want to add anything else.

Have you set a price for the dinner? Do you have any idea how many people you might be serving? Will you sell tickets in advance (helps you can get an idea -- rough idea if you also do at the door sales)? I think you probably have enough to deal with without trying to get sponsorships or donations -- I would consider those things to consider adding next year. Those things take more time than you have to do successfully. You often have to go back, call and follow up a number of times to get an answer or work out details.

Have I made this long enough to lose you yet? LOL Sorry