Catering is defined as the act of providing food and services or concretely it may be defined as preparing orproviding food for someone else to serve; or preparing, delivering and serving food at the premises of another person or event [1] . In today’s world, catering services are generally presented in food courts, restaurants, and fast
food companies. While the demand for food remains stable or constant in many occasions, in some constitutions (i.e., universities, federal buildings and private organizations) variations can be observed because of several reasons.
Seasonal demand changes, holidays, charm of the menus can be counted as examples of these reasons. On the other hand, these alterations cause problems in economic point of view. Private companies and other institutions which have their own food courts, lose money and resources in the case that supply is more than demand. Besides, in some days due to these unforeseen changes, the amount of produced food can’t be adequate to meet demand. This situation is also causes other problems such as lose of customers and prestige. Existence of a system or technique which predicts the demand for the amount food for a given menu for a specific date could benefit to the institutions
in many ways as it optimizes the balance between supply and the demand for saving resources. In essence, this is a real resource optimization problem and data mining techniques can be successfully applied in solving this kind of problems.