I talked to the CEO of the catering company but he didn't want to over step and I understood. At this point I don't believe it is something salvageable.
Must have been more than that or the culmination of many errors.
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These catering agencies are so mercurial that that's just not an effective channel of distribution
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That particular catering agency perhaps has other issues and satayco would have lost them anyway. Hence the "can't rescue the relationships" (realizes it's an abusive relationship so to speak).
Trust me, we know. Most of us here have our own thing going on, and we know that terrible sinking feeling. The feeling that you've disappointed your friends, family, the whole world even. I also know how terrible of a place it is to be. And putting your name to it is much harder. I don't really have any advice because I don't think I'm qualified enough on this topic. But I will say this, stay strong. This is not the end of the world. Your family and friends will not stop talking to you, they will not estrange you, insult you, humiliate you or anything like that. What ever thoughts arise, they are all in your head. Make sure you have enough personal savings to tide you over, and please stay strong.
What you did was perfectly fine. If someone has enough of an allergy that the closed side of fish sauce would hurt someone, they have to say that, and ask for special prep.
Can you share with us what mistake led you to being dropped by your biggest source of revenue? In these sorts of things often an 'after action' report works out pretty well, it goes "Oh we blew it, we did X, this caused Y, we've changed P, Q, and R so that X can't happen again." Startups do that all the time, one of the more common ones is "we didn't secure our servers and gave out everyones login information" or something along those lines.
Restaurants are particularly hard places to succeed because not only are they regulation rich (so there is a lot of energy expended in dealing with the health department) they are abused by fickle tastes. (Ask anyone who has tried to run a Greek restaurant in the south bay for a while now, not sure why but they are darn hard to find)
Your web site talks about attending food festivals, do you have a truck? The Curryupnow folks gave a pretty textbook example of how to build a following by driving to specific spots, tweeting about it, and introducing their cuisine to folks outside their building. That skipped the whole 'get us a catering gig' problem which is, as you've experienced, a challenge.