The Challenges of Catering on Location in Morocco

From desert film sets to mountain kasbahs, here’s what catering on location in Morocco really involves

Catering on location in Morocco never comes with a fixed brief. Every shoot brings its own set of challenges, and sometimes the difficulty is not knowing what they’ll be until you arrive.

It might be the journey to the site. The cooking facilities you’re handed when you get there. A last-minute dietary requirement. Access to water or refrigeration. Or simply the scale of the job — catering for twenty people is a different proposition to catering for two hundred. For film and photography productions bringing European crews to Morocco, this unpredictability is exactly why location catering needs a team that has done it before, in every corner of the country.

Here are a few of the jobs that have tested us — and taught us — over the past year.

When the Fridge Is a Freezer: Catering in the Sahara

Most of our location catering happens within an hour or two of Marrakech, close enough for a recce a few days beforehand. But when the location is eight hours away in the Sahara, you take what you find when you get there.

For a shoot near Erfoud, deep in the desert, we arrived late in the day to find that the food truck serving as our kitchen for the next three days had no working fridge — only a freezer. Keeping three days of ingredients at fridge temperature, using only a freezer, took a calm head and a fairly ingenious system of timers. It worked. It also confirmed something we already knew: in the Sahara, you plan for the kitchen you want and prepare for the kitchen you’ll actually get.

The One We Had to Turn Down

In the summer of 2025 we were contacted by our friends in the Sadiki catering family to ask whether we could join their team on an upcoming production. Everyone involved was under NDA, so all we knew was this: a set in Dakhla, 1,750 people on site, and a 200-strong European crew who we’d be overseeing on the catering side. But we had to say no — we were already committed elsewhere.

Having now seen the finished film and its catering credits, we can only assume we were being asked to work on the set of *The Odyssey*!!! What an experience — and what a challenge — that would have been…

Not Just the Heat: A Winter Morning at Kasbah Bab Ourika

Morocco’s reputation is heat, but the cold catches people out just as often. In January 2026, working with 1001 Productions in the Atlas Mountains at Kasbah Bab Ourika, our kitchen was outdoors, roofed but open to the elements at the front. A 06.00 start for breakfast prep meant working not just in the dark, but in hats, gloves and jackets — a reminder that location catering in the Atlas demands as much cold-weather planning as it does heat management.

Water by Wheelbarrow: Catering for Giorgio Armani

In October 2025, working with Ballroom Productions, we set up camp in the inner courtyard of Kasbah Oumnass — a magnificent, semi-ruined 19th-century fortified kasbah about 45 minutes from our base in central Marrakech. The client was the Armani team from Milan, with high expectations for the European-style food we’d be serving across a two-day shoot.

We built our field kitchen in a tent beside the dining tent — a prep station, a cooking station, a washing-up station. The one thing we couldn’t control was the water source, which sat at the opposite end of the kasbah complex. The solution: a trolley and a large jerrycan, making the return trip again and again to keep the kitchen supplied with fresh water throughout the shoot.

What Location Catering in Morocco Really Takes

However tough the conditions, the job comes down to the same few things: total flexibility, a genuine smile, and above all, working closely with the crew. No matter how remote the location or how tricky the setup, we’re rewarded every time by the same thing — the joy of feeding hungry people, and watching them appreciate our healthy, delicious food that helps them through the challenges of working in a foreign land.

If you’re a production planning a shoot in Marrakech or further afield in Morocco, and need a catering team that’s genuinely done this before — in the desert, in the mountains, and everywhere in between — get in touch with Field Kitchen.