A tender pack lands with a four-week deadline
A college puts its catering contract out to tender. The pack has a hundred questions across menus and nutrition policies, staffing and training, food safety management, allergen procedures, sustainability, social value, mobilisation, contract management and pricing, plus a list of documents: policies, certificates, CVs and case studies.
Your operations director and one other person write the bid around their day jobs. They search the shared drive for last year's school tender and the office campus bid from two years ago. Answers are copied and edited, but some refer to old menus, a manager who has left and a policy that was updated. The policies folder has three versions of the sustainability policy. The pricing schedule is built separately in a spreadsheet from a different template.
Good answers, scattered and ageing
Most contract caterers have already written strong answers to most tender questions. They are just spread across old bids, each tailored to a different client and written at a different time.
- Answers live inside old bid documents, not as reusable pieces.
- Nobody knows which version of an answer is the current approved one.
- Policies and certificates have versions and expiry dates that are not tracked.
- CVs and team structures change as people join and leave.
- Pricing is built separately from the written response, sometimes on different assumptions.
So every bid starts with a search, and every copied answer risks carrying an out-of-date detail into a document a client will score.
Bids written under pressure
Tenders are scored, and small inconsistencies cost marks: an old policy date, a menu that does not match the pricing, a manager named who no longer works for you. Evaluators read many bids and notice when answers feel copied from another client.
The time cost is high as well. Senior people spend days on searching and editing instead of on the parts of the bid that win it: the understanding of this client's site, their people and what they want to change. When two tenders overlap, one of them gets less attention.
A response library and a drafting assistant
- We gather your past bids and break them into approved answers by topic, each with an owner and a review date.
- Policies, certificates, CVs and standard documents are stored in one place with their versions and expiry dates, and you are warned before any lapses.
- When a new tender arrives, its questions are extracted from the pack and matched to the closest approved answers.
- An AI drafting step, using Anthropic Claude or OpenAI models, adapts the matched answers to the question's wording and word limit, and marks what needs tailoring to this client, for your writers to complete.
- Every draft shows its source answers, so reviewers can see what came from where.
- Finished answers can be added back to the library, so it improves with every bid.
- The pricing schedule links to the same staffing and menu assumptions as the written answers, so the two stay consistent.
| Question area | Source in the library | Needs tailoring |
|---|---|---|
| Food safety management | Approved procedure summary | Site-specific details |
| Menus and nutrition | Menu cycle examples | Client's customer profile |
| Staffing and training | Structure and training programme | TUPE and site team |
| Sustainability and social value | Policies and commitments | Local commitments for this client |
| Mobilisation | Standard plan | Dates and site specifics |
Nothing is submitted without your team reviewing it. The AI never invents facts about your business; if the library has no answer, the draft says so.
Bid time spent on the client, not the search
The first draft of a tender response is ready within a short time of the pack arriving, built from your own approved material. Writers spend their time on the questions that decide the bid: this site, this client and why you are the right fit.
Documents are current, CVs are up to date and pricing matches the written answers. When two tenders overlap, both get proper attention, because the groundwork is already done.
After each tender, whether you win or lose, the feedback can be recorded against the answers it relates to, so weak answers are improved before the next bid.
Is this your bid process?
- Tender answers are copied from old bids in a shared drive.
- You have submitted a bid with an out-of-date detail.
- Senior people spend days on each tender.
- Policies and certificates are hard to find in their current version.