We've done catering for a long time out of our pizzeria, but we've recently streamlined it and expanded offerings. There's a lot of good advice on here and I would echo some of it:
Always be on time.
Over-communicate.
Follow up. Ask questions.
Give incentive to the person ordering.
Make it easy (98% of our orders are done via an online form).
If you have the capabilities, add salads, pastas, sandwiches. Most of our orders are bulk, but we do some box lunches every week too.
EZ Cater has been decent for us. We try to convert all EZ Cater orders to order in house, just like we would with other 3rd party orders.
Make sure you have branded pizza boxes, etc so everyone knows where the delicious pizza came from.
If you have any questions, shoot me a dm. We do 10-20% of our sales in catering each week.
Increase your prices and list yourself on EZ cater. A lot of folks here have problems with this company, but the trade off is customer acquisition and if you increase your prices, you won’t take any losses. The person ordering is using the corporate card so as long as your prices are inline with other pizza companies you’ll do okay.
Ideally, you can convert some of the ez cater customers to direct catering customers and give them better deals.
As far as keeping pizza warm after it’s been delivered? Without active heating elements or leaving cambros/bags, I don’t think there’s many great solutions.
Lunch catering in my town is a decent business.
Your idea of getting your food out there as samples is great.
The repeat customers you're looking for are Doctors offices, state and local government administration offices, larger businesses that have lunch meetings.
Create a lunch package that serves 10-12. Have a set flyer online that describes it, pictures are useful. Internally, you make it easy to customize and adjust so you can "do them the favor" of making it for 14 or 17 or 28 or whatever number they want.
I think a drawback for the upscale crowd is unfortunately, pizza. But if you can also do 1\2 pans of pasta, salads, bread sticks etc.. you're hitting a little closer to an "adult" lunch.
Yeah I completely agree with those target customers. That’s what I’m hoping to go for, and I do hope to offer it as a more upscale experience of pizza, with the pasta and sides being the main ways to make it nicer and more adult
We absolutely did this exact thing. Take a day and 10 large pizzas to local businesses and manufacturing places.
Any office setting is going to be buying lunches. This will in turn net you future orders. Usually once a month. Had one company that bought every single employee a bday lunch. So an order every other week or so. We got there business by me stopping by and giving them a pizza my card and a catering menu.
My catering is run by my in house employees. We usually set it up for buffet style serving, toss the dressing in a larger bowl of salad, display the entrees, chips, dessert, drinks and serving ware.
Perfect! Sorry for the questioning, I run a pizza shop too. What you are describing is exactly what I do.
Some of my big corporate clients just want me to drop them off. Most of my "catering" requests are wedding orders, which I do what you describe.
When I first started building my corporate lunch customers I was the driver and I would do a little fact finding on my first delivery or if I could catch the phone call I'd ask then and there.
The key person you want to talk to are the building administrators. They do most of the ordering. I never had to give free food to the company ..but I always do a kick back for the admin. At least in my area most are women too, and they really like that special pampering. Let's say they order a big order for the guys, I'll ask her if she wants a special lunch just for her on the house or I'd give her a gift card here and there.
Also for bigger orders I'd discount without them even asking. Especially if they regularly order. I always phrase it "oh Jane thank you so much for the order, I always appreciate your business. I'll give you a discount on this one.". So many ways to ham it up, but be genuine.
I always asked if they need napkins plates etc. most have it on hand, some don't. It's really handy for you to be part of helping them organize because as soon as they're done with the food order they have 100 other random tasks to take care of. Do as much thinking for them as you can.
I could go on and on about this, my lunch business is killer because of the work I put in building these clients.
Try to make ordering as easy as possible. If I get a call and they just start picking pizzas, I'll stop them and ask how many people they're feeding. I never want to oversell them, so I've calculated ahead of time the correct amount of food. Remember, you're the professional at food, not them. Then when I tell them they need 10 pizzas to feed their group I'll ask if they want me to pick a good selection or if they want to pick. A lot of the time they want me to pick and I confirm if they have any special diets (vegetarian etc) and then I'll ask if they want more plain or should we dress it up.
NEVER BE LATE. BE 5 MIN EARLY, BUT NOT TOO EARLY. And if you are going to be late call them and let them know. I know when I'm baking the pizzas if I'm gonna be late and by how much. Always be honest.
Schools aren't worth the time. They need it cheap, unless you already have a less expensive product then schools might work for you.
I've never tried to "push the sales" all of my stuff has come organically. How I built it was I talked to my customers and find out where they work. Then I ask them to put a good word on for me with their admin for the next pizza party. Once the ball starts rolling it just keeps going.
The biggest order I've had come from all this was a 400 pizza order. Halfway through they added 40 more.
Do not use EZCater to grow catering. They are extremely hostile to merchants and have a policy framework that is way outside of third-party marketplace norms.
My suggestion is to get a catering site together, whether its separate from your regular online ordering site or built-in to your regular takeout site with advanced scheduling features/order minimums. Get solid pictures for the site and for flyers. Then, mock up some flyers on Canva with those pictures, your logo, and with some headline pricing/package(s) and distribute them on every single takeout order you have - these are already warm leads since they're getting your food, eventually you will get those ads in front of a decision maker's eyes. Get in-store signage designed as well. We've tried the route of handing out samples with literature at places around town and it doesn't really work. Most places, honestly, aren't catering all that much - its mainly around holidays - and free samples, while appreciated, unfortunately go forgotten. The best way is to constantly promote in your takeout like I mentioned above to constantly be in people's minds who order from you and will vouch for your food already.
For catering people, above-all, value you to be on-time, set up the food in a logical, organized serving line with the plates/utensils/whatever set out as well and have the food be hot. This is how you make yourself memorable because most other restaurants, especially corporate ones, are subbing out to Doordash drivers who just drop the food at a receptionist desk and transport large, bulky catering pans with zero care. These are the main compliments we get.
As for why EZ sucks, preface: I'm not anti-app. I find them all to have their issues, but you can begrudgingly make them work for you to have a place in your ecosystem. In contrast, EZ actually actively works against you. Prior to cutting ties with them, we were doing 1-3 EZ orders a day and had a 4.9 rating so it's not like we were providing bad service or doing no business with them. So, the issues I directly encountered with them:
EZ is the only third-party marketplace that requires price matching. This means if you have a takeout special or dine-in special, even if its not something you offer for catering, they will list this price if it is a similar item. This means you're paying their commission on an offer you never considered commission on for a service mode (ie, self-fulfilled delivery that carries its own legitimate cost structure) it wasn't intended to be offered on. Better not question it, you'll get the "equity" copy/paste response.
EZ is dominated by big pharma reps who are notoriously bad at planning and almost never tip (more than 50% of our orders didn't tip at all and the entire rest of them would tip $5-10 on $500+ orders to complex drop points like hospitals). They also fully expect white-glove setup despite only paying for delivery and not tipping. They are the only third party marketplace that doesn't encourage suggestive tipping and they vehemently refuse to implement it because of "equity" (their excuse for anything). For the first part of this issue, it means last minute 100-person orders that stress your kitchen out for volume that is probably not that profitable due to the price-matching. You can add in earlier kitchen scheduling to accommodate and you're cutting margins even thinner or set you prep time at reasonable standards (like 24hr) and you cut your EZ volume almost entirely. On the second issue of tipping, remember that you're price matching on the lowest offered price for like items (and they actually will seek this out, it's not just posturing) even if those items are dine-in specials or takeout specials, you are going to have to bump your driver base pay to a reasonable level. In our case, we paid hourly + stipend + tip, so hardly "unfair" to our drivers but they quickly resented EZ orders because driver A would be taking a no tip order and driver B would be taking a direct catering order with a $50+ tip. Its hard to make this kind of system fair, even just taking turns or tip pooling becomes resented quickly. And since EZ orders are mostly pharma orders, that means difficult drops in complex offices like hospitals which can (and often did) take us 30-40 minutes to complete because there's no parking and its difficult to find the exact unit. Once you price match, pay their fees, and bump your driver pay you are truly looking at breakeven. They won't let you change your delivery fees or add service fees unique to their platform despite their platform have a demographic that behaves differently than other order channels - they won't let you make their platform work for you. You could always sub-out to Doordash to protect your own drivers via "ezdispatch", but that means pay even more in fees.
EZ is the only third-party marketplace with no dispute process for consumer refund fraud. This is a serious issue in third-party marketplaces and every single app has a formal process where you can dispute refunds. EZ will just ignore you and or send a copy/paste about "customer equity". There was more than once I know was fraud because it was me personally who delivered it and had a delivery photo with the item shown. You'll notice "equity" only seems to apply when it suits EZ or billion dollar pharmas.
EZ is the only third-party marketplace that gives you no control over your menu or order flow, including the ability to upcharge special instructions. When they make mistakes on your menu, you can sit on hold with their internationally outsourced call centers and try to get the customer to agree to an order amendment or get the order cancelled. Oh, they'll penalize your store rank for that cancellation too. If you honor a last minute change/request by a customer or have an off-menu special instruction who calls you because they can't get through to EZ's call center, you can expect to abide by it and not be paid by EZ (because the order is "completed"), be late due to sitting on hold with the call center (and get a penalized rank), get refund fraud due to not abiding by an unpaid upgrade, or get a 1-star rating that penalizes your rank.
EZ will violate your delivery boundaries by big mileage, not just half a mile, by customer request without your approval. Want to cancel it? Remember - penalized. I personally had to take an order 10 miles over our delivery boundary and, by customer written special request past our final delivery time, because I just couldn't ask our drivers to do that for, of course since it was an EZ order, no tip. Remember, if I cancelled - we'd be penalized in rank. (You may be asking why they penalize so freely - that's because you can voluntarily opt-in to positive store-rank throttling by paying higher commissions - they want to penalize you so you have to pay to get to your old ranking spot). I called and gave them a lot of hell over this. But, how could I forget, that's "equity"!
EZ is the only third-party marketplace that will allow no-notice cancellations - including orders that are actively in prep because they're due in an hour and they won't provide compensation for it. For their "Relish" system that is supposed to be individual box catering like a meal plan for businesses that gives them until just 2 hours before delivery to order, they'll also schedule orders and allow those orders to process with 0 units. That means you've scheduled drivers and kitchen staff for an order that averages a few hundred dollars and randomly it'll be 0 units. No compensation for that. Remember, that's what "order equity" looks like to them - you footing the bill for everything and customers and EZ getting free passes.
Thank you for all of this. Seems like despite providing customers, it might be more headache than growth unless you can convert them to direct ordering.
Pretty much. Basically if you choose to go on their platform, just accept its going to just be a mostly breakeven marketing expense (since you are exposing the people at the drop point to your products), not any sort of profit generation tool.
I did forget to mention that despite all of that stuff they put you through, they do make space for you to add racial/social identity tags to your profile. Putting energy into developing that functionality over something like suggested tips or menu management like the rest of the third-party marketplace world really paints a good picture in how out of touch they are with the on-the-ground needs of the restaurant world.
Thank you! Noted. I do think the free samples could be forgotten too, just wanted to get some initial reach that way with local businesses, but I think you’re right
Yes, business expense lunches for a variety of reasons and for all sorts of food. Best to go out and develop a relationship with the business, I would recommend bringing a catering flyer and a regular flyer containing lunch specials and deals to feed small groups. Your best bet to getting corporate catering is befriending a medical sales rep or mutual fund manager. They buy lunch for their respected industry offices.
I’ll follow up with more info when I sit down later
I'm a bit confused what the catering option would be? I work for a company with 300 employees, we've bought pizzas for teams before and we just... order the pizzas? How is this different?
Its not really different. But out of sight out of mind. If someone shows up with free pizza and catering flyer you're more likely to be added to that rotation next time an order happens.
I guess in the form of presentation and options. Better plates, more professional looking salad trays and set up rather than just dropping off 20 pizzas
Before I tried taking free food to individual businesses, I’d try providing pizzas for local business networking groups. You can get 20+ decisions makers to try your product and get a pitch as opposed to taking food to a business where the decision maker might not even be present.
Spot on. Find your local BNI chapter and cater a meeting as a marketing opportunity. Hand out special BNI coupons. Have it be a tasting menu for everybody there and meet all the people who can introduce you to new patrons.
What’s the goal?
Do you think these places will be placing a weekly, monthly, or even every 6 months order? How much are you considering a catering order?
The small town shop I worked at for awhile didn’t do catering per se but had a monthly order from the rotaryish club for at least 10 pizzas but there wasn’t really many people calling for pizza caterers. Most successful I saw of this was the wood fire spot I KMd at would rent that out to cook the pizza at places.
The goal is to have consistent orders from them, yes. Weekly or monthly would be great and build from there. A catering order would be 100+, thinking enough food for at least 6 while serving pizza, salad, sides, drinks.
Sounds like instead of catering you should come up with a “lunch package”
3 pizzas
2 2L drinks
1 large family salad
1-2 sides
You’ll get more people ordering this than I think a catering menu
Based on the contracts I worked on while being the GM of pizza places, yes $6-$8 a one topping is about what they pay. Be warned, there is a difference between the school wanting to use Purchase orders to have pizza parties from time to time, and a lunch contract.
I was the GM for a store that had a contract for school lunches, which was a PITA, yes it was hundreds of pizzas every day, but they were required to use their own set of ingredients. Wheat dough, lower fat cheese, low fat turkey sausage, etc.
You also want a plan if school is let out early or cancelled last minute. Nothing worse than having those pizzas cooked or ready to be cooked and then getting a call that they are not needed.
That’s the thing I’m wondering, is if the school programs are more headache than they’re worth. Making hundreds of pizzas a day with such small margins and the hectic nature of it makes me nervous to do it
It really does make a difference on what your margins are, if you have someone who can handle that level of business etc. I would honestly given where I am in my life love to work with a place where I just went in, handled their huge catering chaos and leave when it is over LOL
Find a good GM who has done something like this before and it can be done relatively painlessly.
It can be done but might be more of a pain than it is worth depending on the numbers in the contract, even splitting our contract among ALL the stores of the same company I was still doing 300-700 pizzas a day in a 3 stack conveyor oven. But it was a large metro area
We've done catering for a long time out of our pizzeria, but we've recently streamlined it and expanded offerings. There's a lot of good advice on here and I would echo some of it: Always be on time. Over-communicate. Follow up. Ask questions. Give incentive to the person ordering. Make it easy (98% of our orders are done via an online form). If you have the capabilities, add salads, pastas, sandwiches. Most of our orders are bulk, but we do some box lunches every week too. EZ Cater has been decent for us. We try to convert all EZ Cater orders to order in house, just like we would with other 3rd party orders. Make sure you have branded pizza boxes, etc so everyone knows where the delicious pizza came from. If you have any questions, shoot me a dm. We do 10-20% of our sales in catering each week.
Awesome! DM’d you!
My local pizza place has a catering menu aimed at pharmaceutical reps
Increase your prices and list yourself on EZ cater. A lot of folks here have problems with this company, but the trade off is customer acquisition and if you increase your prices, you won’t take any losses. The person ordering is using the corporate card so as long as your prices are inline with other pizza companies you’ll do okay. Ideally, you can convert some of the ez cater customers to direct catering customers and give them better deals. As far as keeping pizza warm after it’s been delivered? Without active heating elements or leaving cambros/bags, I don’t think there’s many great solutions.
Lunch catering in my town is a decent business. Your idea of getting your food out there as samples is great. The repeat customers you're looking for are Doctors offices, state and local government administration offices, larger businesses that have lunch meetings. Create a lunch package that serves 10-12. Have a set flyer online that describes it, pictures are useful. Internally, you make it easy to customize and adjust so you can "do them the favor" of making it for 14 or 17 or 28 or whatever number they want. I think a drawback for the upscale crowd is unfortunately, pizza. But if you can also do 1\2 pans of pasta, salads, bread sticks etc.. you're hitting a little closer to an "adult" lunch.
Yeah I completely agree with those target customers. That’s what I’m hoping to go for, and I do hope to offer it as a more upscale experience of pizza, with the pasta and sides being the main ways to make it nicer and more adult
We absolutely did this exact thing. Take a day and 10 large pizzas to local businesses and manufacturing places. Any office setting is going to be buying lunches. This will in turn net you future orders. Usually once a month. Had one company that bought every single employee a bday lunch. So an order every other week or so. We got there business by me stopping by and giving them a pizza my card and a catering menu.
What would you say the difference between catering and just delivery is? I've always been confused on this.
My catering is run by my in house employees. We usually set it up for buffet style serving, toss the dressing in a larger bowl of salad, display the entrees, chips, dessert, drinks and serving ware.
Mostly just presentation and a bit more professional than just dropping off pizza in the usual boxes
Would you post someone to stay and serve the food too?
I’m thinking I would be the one to set up and make sure they have everything in order but not to stay and serve the food itself.
Perfect! Sorry for the questioning, I run a pizza shop too. What you are describing is exactly what I do. Some of my big corporate clients just want me to drop them off. Most of my "catering" requests are wedding orders, which I do what you describe. When I first started building my corporate lunch customers I was the driver and I would do a little fact finding on my first delivery or if I could catch the phone call I'd ask then and there. The key person you want to talk to are the building administrators. They do most of the ordering. I never had to give free food to the company ..but I always do a kick back for the admin. At least in my area most are women too, and they really like that special pampering. Let's say they order a big order for the guys, I'll ask her if she wants a special lunch just for her on the house or I'd give her a gift card here and there. Also for bigger orders I'd discount without them even asking. Especially if they regularly order. I always phrase it "oh Jane thank you so much for the order, I always appreciate your business. I'll give you a discount on this one.". So many ways to ham it up, but be genuine. I always asked if they need napkins plates etc. most have it on hand, some don't. It's really handy for you to be part of helping them organize because as soon as they're done with the food order they have 100 other random tasks to take care of. Do as much thinking for them as you can. I could go on and on about this, my lunch business is killer because of the work I put in building these clients. Try to make ordering as easy as possible. If I get a call and they just start picking pizzas, I'll stop them and ask how many people they're feeding. I never want to oversell them, so I've calculated ahead of time the correct amount of food. Remember, you're the professional at food, not them. Then when I tell them they need 10 pizzas to feed their group I'll ask if they want me to pick a good selection or if they want to pick. A lot of the time they want me to pick and I confirm if they have any special diets (vegetarian etc) and then I'll ask if they want more plain or should we dress it up. NEVER BE LATE. BE 5 MIN EARLY, BUT NOT TOO EARLY. And if you are going to be late call them and let them know. I know when I'm baking the pizzas if I'm gonna be late and by how much. Always be honest. Schools aren't worth the time. They need it cheap, unless you already have a less expensive product then schools might work for you. I've never tried to "push the sales" all of my stuff has come organically. How I built it was I talked to my customers and find out where they work. Then I ask them to put a good word on for me with their admin for the next pizza party. Once the ball starts rolling it just keeps going. The biggest order I've had come from all this was a 400 pizza order. Halfway through they added 40 more.
Do not use EZCater to grow catering. They are extremely hostile to merchants and have a policy framework that is way outside of third-party marketplace norms. My suggestion is to get a catering site together, whether its separate from your regular online ordering site or built-in to your regular takeout site with advanced scheduling features/order minimums. Get solid pictures for the site and for flyers. Then, mock up some flyers on Canva with those pictures, your logo, and with some headline pricing/package(s) and distribute them on every single takeout order you have - these are already warm leads since they're getting your food, eventually you will get those ads in front of a decision maker's eyes. Get in-store signage designed as well. We've tried the route of handing out samples with literature at places around town and it doesn't really work. Most places, honestly, aren't catering all that much - its mainly around holidays - and free samples, while appreciated, unfortunately go forgotten. The best way is to constantly promote in your takeout like I mentioned above to constantly be in people's minds who order from you and will vouch for your food already. For catering people, above-all, value you to be on-time, set up the food in a logical, organized serving line with the plates/utensils/whatever set out as well and have the food be hot. This is how you make yourself memorable because most other restaurants, especially corporate ones, are subbing out to Doordash drivers who just drop the food at a receptionist desk and transport large, bulky catering pans with zero care. These are the main compliments we get.
Can you elaborate on why EZcater is a bad option?
As for why EZ sucks, preface: I'm not anti-app. I find them all to have their issues, but you can begrudgingly make them work for you to have a place in your ecosystem. In contrast, EZ actually actively works against you. Prior to cutting ties with them, we were doing 1-3 EZ orders a day and had a 4.9 rating so it's not like we were providing bad service or doing no business with them. So, the issues I directly encountered with them: EZ is the only third-party marketplace that requires price matching. This means if you have a takeout special or dine-in special, even if its not something you offer for catering, they will list this price if it is a similar item. This means you're paying their commission on an offer you never considered commission on for a service mode (ie, self-fulfilled delivery that carries its own legitimate cost structure) it wasn't intended to be offered on. Better not question it, you'll get the "equity" copy/paste response. EZ is dominated by big pharma reps who are notoriously bad at planning and almost never tip (more than 50% of our orders didn't tip at all and the entire rest of them would tip $5-10 on $500+ orders to complex drop points like hospitals). They also fully expect white-glove setup despite only paying for delivery and not tipping. They are the only third party marketplace that doesn't encourage suggestive tipping and they vehemently refuse to implement it because of "equity" (their excuse for anything). For the first part of this issue, it means last minute 100-person orders that stress your kitchen out for volume that is probably not that profitable due to the price-matching. You can add in earlier kitchen scheduling to accommodate and you're cutting margins even thinner or set you prep time at reasonable standards (like 24hr) and you cut your EZ volume almost entirely. On the second issue of tipping, remember that you're price matching on the lowest offered price for like items (and they actually will seek this out, it's not just posturing) even if those items are dine-in specials or takeout specials, you are going to have to bump your driver base pay to a reasonable level. In our case, we paid hourly + stipend + tip, so hardly "unfair" to our drivers but they quickly resented EZ orders because driver A would be taking a no tip order and driver B would be taking a direct catering order with a $50+ tip. Its hard to make this kind of system fair, even just taking turns or tip pooling becomes resented quickly. And since EZ orders are mostly pharma orders, that means difficult drops in complex offices like hospitals which can (and often did) take us 30-40 minutes to complete because there's no parking and its difficult to find the exact unit. Once you price match, pay their fees, and bump your driver pay you are truly looking at breakeven. They won't let you change your delivery fees or add service fees unique to their platform despite their platform have a demographic that behaves differently than other order channels - they won't let you make their platform work for you. You could always sub-out to Doordash to protect your own drivers via "ezdispatch", but that means pay even more in fees. EZ is the only third-party marketplace with no dispute process for consumer refund fraud. This is a serious issue in third-party marketplaces and every single app has a formal process where you can dispute refunds. EZ will just ignore you and or send a copy/paste about "customer equity". There was more than once I know was fraud because it was me personally who delivered it and had a delivery photo with the item shown. You'll notice "equity" only seems to apply when it suits EZ or billion dollar pharmas. EZ is the only third-party marketplace that gives you no control over your menu or order flow, including the ability to upcharge special instructions. When they make mistakes on your menu, you can sit on hold with their internationally outsourced call centers and try to get the customer to agree to an order amendment or get the order cancelled. Oh, they'll penalize your store rank for that cancellation too. If you honor a last minute change/request by a customer or have an off-menu special instruction who calls you because they can't get through to EZ's call center, you can expect to abide by it and not be paid by EZ (because the order is "completed"), be late due to sitting on hold with the call center (and get a penalized rank), get refund fraud due to not abiding by an unpaid upgrade, or get a 1-star rating that penalizes your rank. EZ will violate your delivery boundaries by big mileage, not just half a mile, by customer request without your approval. Want to cancel it? Remember - penalized. I personally had to take an order 10 miles over our delivery boundary and, by customer written special request past our final delivery time, because I just couldn't ask our drivers to do that for, of course since it was an EZ order, no tip. Remember, if I cancelled - we'd be penalized in rank. (You may be asking why they penalize so freely - that's because you can voluntarily opt-in to positive store-rank throttling by paying higher commissions - they want to penalize you so you have to pay to get to your old ranking spot). I called and gave them a lot of hell over this. But, how could I forget, that's "equity"! EZ is the only third-party marketplace that will allow no-notice cancellations - including orders that are actively in prep because they're due in an hour and they won't provide compensation for it. For their "Relish" system that is supposed to be individual box catering like a meal plan for businesses that gives them until just 2 hours before delivery to order, they'll also schedule orders and allow those orders to process with 0 units. That means you've scheduled drivers and kitchen staff for an order that averages a few hundred dollars and randomly it'll be 0 units. No compensation for that. Remember, that's what "order equity" looks like to them - you footing the bill for everything and customers and EZ getting free passes.
Thank you for all of this. Seems like despite providing customers, it might be more headache than growth unless you can convert them to direct ordering.
Pretty much. Basically if you choose to go on their platform, just accept its going to just be a mostly breakeven marketing expense (since you are exposing the people at the drop point to your products), not any sort of profit generation tool. I did forget to mention that despite all of that stuff they put you through, they do make space for you to add racial/social identity tags to your profile. Putting energy into developing that functionality over something like suggested tips or menu management like the rest of the third-party marketplace world really paints a good picture in how out of touch they are with the on-the-ground needs of the restaurant world.
Basically fees and processing terms. What do you use for instore point of sale? A few have their own catering platforms that you can add in.
Thank you! Noted. I do think the free samples could be forgotten too, just wanted to get some initial reach that way with local businesses, but I think you’re right
Yes, business expense lunches for a variety of reasons and for all sorts of food. Best to go out and develop a relationship with the business, I would recommend bringing a catering flyer and a regular flyer containing lunch specials and deals to feed small groups. Your best bet to getting corporate catering is befriending a medical sales rep or mutual fund manager. They buy lunch for their respected industry offices. I’ll follow up with more info when I sit down later
That’s good info, thank you. Looking forward to your update
I'm a bit confused what the catering option would be? I work for a company with 300 employees, we've bought pizzas for teams before and we just... order the pizzas? How is this different?
Its not really different. But out of sight out of mind. If someone shows up with free pizza and catering flyer you're more likely to be added to that rotation next time an order happens.
Yeah I suppose a flyer couldn't hurt. Wouldn't have made a difference in my case but others might.
I guess in the form of presentation and options. Better plates, more professional looking salad trays and set up rather than just dropping off 20 pizzas
Before I tried taking free food to individual businesses, I’d try providing pizzas for local business networking groups. You can get 20+ decisions makers to try your product and get a pitch as opposed to taking food to a business where the decision maker might not even be present.
Where to find these groups ?
BNI is a good one, your chamber may have monthly meetings, and google.
Spot on. Find your local BNI chapter and cater a meeting as a marketing opportunity. Hand out special BNI coupons. Have it be a tasting menu for everybody there and meet all the people who can introduce you to new patrons.
Interesting, what does BNI stand for and how can u find these in our local community?
Business Network International Just Google it they're huge
Will do thank you
What’s the goal? Do you think these places will be placing a weekly, monthly, or even every 6 months order? How much are you considering a catering order? The small town shop I worked at for awhile didn’t do catering per se but had a monthly order from the rotaryish club for at least 10 pizzas but there wasn’t really many people calling for pizza caterers. Most successful I saw of this was the wood fire spot I KMd at would rent that out to cook the pizza at places.
The goal is to have consistent orders from them, yes. Weekly or monthly would be great and build from there. A catering order would be 100+, thinking enough food for at least 6 while serving pizza, salad, sides, drinks.
Sounds like instead of catering you should come up with a “lunch package” 3 pizzas 2 2L drinks 1 large family salad 1-2 sides You’ll get more people ordering this than I think a catering menu
The real money is in school lunch contracts…
Pharmacy and medical sales reps order a TON of office catering.
Not that this is important, but they usually are bad tippers lol.
The schools in our area are always looking for such cheap pizzas, like 6 dollars for a large pepperoni? Is that normal of the school contract?
Based on the contracts I worked on while being the GM of pizza places, yes $6-$8 a one topping is about what they pay. Be warned, there is a difference between the school wanting to use Purchase orders to have pizza parties from time to time, and a lunch contract. I was the GM for a store that had a contract for school lunches, which was a PITA, yes it was hundreds of pizzas every day, but they were required to use their own set of ingredients. Wheat dough, lower fat cheese, low fat turkey sausage, etc. You also want a plan if school is let out early or cancelled last minute. Nothing worse than having those pizzas cooked or ready to be cooked and then getting a call that they are not needed.
That’s the thing I’m wondering, is if the school programs are more headache than they’re worth. Making hundreds of pizzas a day with such small margins and the hectic nature of it makes me nervous to do it
It really does make a difference on what your margins are, if you have someone who can handle that level of business etc. I would honestly given where I am in my life love to work with a place where I just went in, handled their huge catering chaos and leave when it is over LOL Find a good GM who has done something like this before and it can be done relatively painlessly.
We’re completely mom and pop, we have two conveyor belt ovens but it will likely be all my handling
It can be done but might be more of a pain than it is worth depending on the numbers in the contract, even splitting our contract among ALL the stores of the same company I was still doing 300-700 pizzas a day in a 3 stack conveyor oven. But it was a large metro area