How to Get More Catering Clients for Your Restaurant

You've built a catering menu, set your pricing, and maybe even set up online ordering. Now you need customers. Here's what actually works.

Choose the right channel for your restaurant

Start with the audience you can reach and the orders your kitchen can fulfill reliably. The table is a planning guide, not a ranking of guaranteed returns. Choose one or two approaches your team can consistently manage before adding more.

A qualified inquiry has a date, location and group size you can serve, plus a budget that fits your offer. A link click or a business on a prospect list is not yet a qualified inquiry.

Save the entry page and campaign source with each inquiry where possible, and ask how buyers found you when that information is missing. Keep unknown sources separate rather than guessing. Compare booked orders and contribution after ingredients, packaging, incremental labor, delivery and acquisition costs, not just visits or replies.

For example, a restaurant with steady lunch traffic but little catering awareness could test a register QR code first. A restaurant already receiving quote requests should check why those quotes do not become orders before adding another acquisition channel. For marketplace economics, use the ezCater fee breakdown; for search visibility, use the catering SEO checklist.

The corporate catering opportunity

First, where the money is. Corporate catering accounts for the majority of drop-off catering revenue for most restaurants, because office lunches, team meetings, trainings, client visits, and company celebrations happen every week at businesses near you, and a single corporate account can be worth hundreds or thousands of dollars per month in repeat orders.

Corporate catering is a relationship business. You're not selling to strangers one at a time. You're building accounts with office managers, executive assistants, and HR teams who order again and again.

Strategy 1: Local business outreach

Local business outreach fits restaurants that can reliably deliver group meals and assign someone to follow up. Focus on nearby businesses with a plausible need for your packages rather than treating every office address as an opportunity.

The door-to-door approach

Confirm that a business accepts visits or samples before planning a drop-off. Check the delivery fit and find out who arranges meals. Count sample costs and staff time when judging whether outreach is worthwhile.

Use the corporate catering clients guide for the buyer checklist, editable prospect worksheet, outreach email and worked example from first contact to a repeat account.

Follow up

Record the buyer's next action and preferred timing. Respect requests to stop contact and get agreement before adding someone to ongoing promotional emails. The corporate-clients guide includes a post-order follow-up example for your own customer relationships.

Strategy 2: Optimize your online presence

Buyers who don't know you yet start on Google, so that's where you need to show up.

Google Business Profile

• Add "catering" to your business categories
• Upload photos of your catering spreads (not just dine-in food)
• Mention catering in your business description
• Add your catering ordering link as a website link
• Respond to reviews that mention catering

Your website

Add a dedicated catering page (or better, an online ordering page), put "catering" in your page titles and meta descriptions, and show photos of catering setups rather than individual dishes. The "Order Catering" button should be impossible to miss, not buried in a dropdown.

Local SEO

Target keywords like "[your city] catering" and "[your cuisine] catering [your city]", get listed on local business directories, and ask happy catering clients to leave Google reviews that mention catering specifically.

Strategy 3: Leverage your existing customers

Your dine-in and takeout regulars are your warmest catering leads. They already trust the food. They just don't know you cater.

In-restaurant promotion

A table tent or menu insert ("Need to feed a group? Ask about our catering!"), your catering link at the bottom of every receipt, a simple poster near the register, and servers trained to ask "Do you ever need catering for your office?" when a regular comes in.

Email marketing

If you have a customer email list, use it.

• Send a dedicated "We now offer catering" announcement
• Include catering in your monthly newsletter
• Offer an exclusive discount for existing customers' first catering order
• Share photos of recent catering orders to build social proof

Social media

Post photos of catering setups, both before delivery and at the client's location. Share testimonials from catering clients. Run a "First catering order gets 10% off" promotion. And tag corporate clients who are willing, since B2B visibility is the whole point.

Strategy 4: Partner with complementary businesses

Some businesses need catering all the time and don't want to source it themselves. Be their answer.

Event planners - offer a referral fee or commission for every catering order they send you. They're already planning events and need reliable food partners.

Coworking spaces - offer to be their preferred catering vendor for member events, lunch-and-learns, and community gatherings.

Real estate agents - open houses, client appreciation events, and closing gifts all need catering. Offer a standing discount for their office.

Hotels without restaurants - business travelers need meeting catering, and hotels without in-house food service need to recommend someone.

Corporate wellness companies - healthy meal programs for offices are growing, and your restaurant might be a perfect fit.

Strategy 5: Offer a first-order incentive

The first order is the hard one, so make it cheap to say yes.

• 10-15% off first catering order - enough to motivate, not enough to destroy margin
• Free delivery on first order - removes the biggest hesitation
• Free dessert platter with first order over $200 - adds value without heavy discounting
• Complimentary sampler tray - let them try before committing to a large order

You're not buying one order. You're buying the relationship, and a happy corporate customer comes back for recurring lunches, trainings, client meetings, and seasonal events until that first-order discount has turned into thousands.

Strategy 6: Build a referral program

Your best catering customers can be your best salespeople.

• $25 credit for every referred customer who places their first order
• Free platter upgrade for customers who refer 3+ new accounts
• Quarterly appreciation - send a thank-you gift to your top referring accounts

Keep it simple. Points and tiers won't get used. "$25 off your next order for every referral" is easy to remember and easy to repeat.

Strategy 7: Use catering software with built-in growth tools

Manual follow-up works at 5 catering clients. It falls apart at 20+. The right catering software does the remembering for you.

• Automated re-order emails - "It's been 3 weeks since your last order. Ready to reorder?"
• Customer CRM - track who orders, how often, and what they prefer
• Order history - make reordering as easy as clicking "repeat last order"
• Email campaigns - promote seasonal specials, new menu items, or holiday catering

FlashCater builds all of this into the platform so you're not cobbling together separate tools for ordering, management, and marketing.

The 30-day launch plan

Starting from zero? Here's the timeline:

Week 1: Set up your catering menu and online ordering. Update your Google Business Profile. Email your customer list.

Week 2: Visit 10-15 local businesses with sampler trays. Post on social media. Add catering signage in your restaurant.

Week 3: Follow up with every business you visited. Send a second email to your list. Reach out to 3-5 potential referral partners.

Week 4: Evaluate results. Which tactics generated orders? Double down on those. Set up automated re-order emails for customers who've ordered.

At the end of the month, compare qualified inquiries, quotes, confirmed orders and costs by channel. Keep the approach that produces worthwhile orders, and investigate weak handoffs before spending more. This is a test schedule, not a promise of a fixed number of orders.

If nobody on your team can own outreach, follow-up, and reorder emails every week (and in most restaurants nobody can), look at an outsourced catering sales manager or FlashCater's broader restaurant catering growth service.