It’s important for these culinary pros to learn that the best clients will require coverage.
Personal chef insurance is among the first things you should purchase before cooking a professional meal for another person. There are many reasons that this coverage should be considered a foundation component to your business.
This protection starts with liability insurance but expands beyond that depending on your services.
The main issue is simply that chefs are people, too. Mistakes happen. Regardless of the care taken to avoid the mistakes, the training and experience they have behind them, or the other precautions taken, sometimes things simply don’t work out. Professional chef insurance is what makes certain that when something does happen, it won’t be financially devastating.
This may not seem like the type of job in which there could be a large risk of lawsuits, but there are a number of very common risks associated with cooking professionally. This is particularly true when you are preparing and/or cooking the food in a kitchen that does not belong to you, such as your customer’s home.
Personal chef insurance can help to protect against many risks connected to food preparation.
For instance, it takes only a slip to damage a customer’s countertops with a knife or a hot pan. Floor could be marked or tile could be cracked by dropping a heavy pot. If service dishes don’t belong to you and you break one, that is also an easy risk. Beyond that, there is the chance that someone you serve becomes affected by food poisoning.
While there is no specific personal chef insurance policy, some insurers with expertise in covering this type of small business will customize a group of policies that will cover all the various areas of risk that you may face.
Primary among them will include a general business policy. That said, your coverage will also include a liability policy. If you will be using your vehicle to drive and pick up ingredients or for transportation to a customer’s home, then you will also need a commercial auto policy.
Being able to show your certificate of coverage – particularly in terms of liability insurance – will be integral to ensuring that you will meet the requirements of some of the best customers. After all, having this coverage in place provides both you and your clients with important protection in case things happen to go wrong.