How to increaserestaurant catering sales

Who buys catering from a restaurant, and when

Catering buyers are rarely food people. They are office managers and assistants ordering lunch for a meeting, parents organizing a team party, church and school coordinators, and families planning a graduation, a shower or a gathering after a funeral. Each one is judged by someone else on whether the food arrived on time, fed everyone and stayed in budget.

Their calendars differ, and that decides when you reach them. Office lunches repeat through the work week and often go back to whoever did it well last time. Family parties cluster on weekends and around graduation season. Holiday office parties fill December weeks ahead, which our holiday marketing guide plans for. Write a package for each buyer you want, and show each one the package that fits their week.

Packages that travel and still make money

The best food to cater is whatever your kitchen already makes well from ingredients it already stocks, in a form that holds up for an hour in a closed tray. Braises, roasted meats, grain bowls, pasta bakes, tacos built on site and big salads with the dressing on the side travel well. Food that only works while it is crisp, careful plating and anything that must be eaten in five minutes usually does not.

Cost each package with the containers, the serving utensils and the driver's time included, not just the food. Set a minimum headcount that makes a delivery worth sending. And keep the catering menu short, so a big Thursday order does not empty the walk-in before dinner service.

A price per person ends the back-and-forth

A planner with a budget and a deadline skips the restaurant that makes them call for a price. Put a price per person on every package, plus the minimum order, the delivery area and fee, and how far ahead to order. If you offer setup, staff or rentals, list them as add-ons on their own line.

Some owners worry that published prices scare people off. In practice a clear starting price filters out requests you could never fill and brings in buyers who already know they can afford you. Large or unusual orders can still be quoted by hand. Our private events guide makes the same case for room minimums.

The words that get you named when someone asks

An office manager types “catering near me” or asks an assistant who can feed 25 people on Thursday. The answers come from pages and listings that say plainly what a place caters, for how many, how far ahead and where it delivers. A PDF of the dinner menu gives them nothing to work with.

Give catering its own page on your website, with each package written out in words, photos of real trays, the headcounts and a short order form. Add catering to your Google listing, post photos of real orders, and ask happy catering customers for a review that says the word catering. Our search work for restaurants builds and maintains these pages.

Ads for catering, and who to show them to

The best time to reach a catering buyer is before the meeting is on the calendar. Ads aimed at people who live and work within 1 to 5 miles, showing a full tray and the price per person, plant the idea weeks ahead. Our 3X Advertising System also shows your restaurant again to people who already visited, with an emphasis on high-ticket private events and catering, because past guests are the warmest buyers you have.

Small budgets can move quickly when the offer is clear. An event venue in Brooklyn, a second location, booked three parties in its first week on $250 of ads. One catering and events company wrote in its review that we “discussed strategies, ideas and also a plan of action to help scale and grow my catering and event company.” Our Facebook advertising page shows how those campaigns are built.

What the quote should say

The quote is where most catering orders are won or lost, and the buyer reads it on a phone between two other jobs. Keep it to one screen. These are the lines that make a buyer say yes without another round of questions:

• The package name, the headcount it serves and the price per person.
• The total, with delivery and any service charge already added.
• The delivery window and who to call if the driver is late.
• What arrives with the food: plates, napkins, utensils, serving spoons, labels.
• How to confirm and pay, with a link, and the deadline for changes.
• One photo of the package as it actually arrives.

Turn one order into a standing order

The most valuable catering customer orders every other Tuesday without shopping around. Treat the first order as an audition. Deliver early, label every tray, include plates and napkins, and check in the next day to ask how it went.

Then keep a simple list of every catering customer: what they ordered, how many it fed and when. A reminder the week before their usual meeting, with this month's menu, often turns a one-time order into a habit. Put a card with your catering page address in every bag, so the next order comes straight to you instead of through an app that takes a cut.

Count catering on its own line

Catering disappears when it rings through the same register as dinner. Give it its own line in your sales report so you can see, every month, how many orders came in, what they were worth, how many were repeat customers and where each new one found you. Without that, you cannot tell whether an ad, a listing or a tasting box did the work.

Those numbers also tell you what to film next. If office lunches are growing and parties are flat, the next shoot should show trays arriving at a meeting, not a dining room at night. Our budget guide shows how to put a dollar value on one more order before you spend to reach it.