How to Grow a Catering Business Inside Your Restaurant

Most restaurants that "do catering" have a menu PDF, an inquiry form, and a few orders a month from people who already knew about it. Growing past that is not a marketing problem or a menu problem. It is a system problem: nobody is building a list, nobody is reaching out, and nobody follows up after an order goes out the door.

This guide is the system. It is written for restaurant owners and managers who want catering to become a real channel, and it is the same playbook we run for restaurants at FlashCater. You can run it yourself. Where it helps, we have included the worksheet, the email templates, the call script and the weekly schedule so you do not have to invent them.

Where catering growth actually comes from

Catering revenue compounds in a way dine-in revenue doesn't. A regular who eats lunch at your place twice a week is worth maybe $1,500 a year. An office manager who orders a $400 lunch for a team meeting twice a month is worth close to $10,000 a year, and she will keep ordering as long as the food shows up on time and the ordering is painless.

So the job is not "get more catering orders." The job is to win accounts that reorder. Everything below is organized around three levers:

Fix them in that order only if the ordering path already works. If it doesn't, fix conversion first. More demand into a broken ordering path just produces more people who gave up.

Step 1: Build an offer an office manager can buy in five minutes

Before any outreach, look at your catering page the way a busy office manager does. She has a meeting Thursday, 18 people, a budget of about $20 a head, and two other tabs open. If she has to add up 14 individual items and email you to ask about delivery, she orders from the place in the other tab.

What she needs to see:

• Three to five packages priced per person. Boxed lunches, a sandwich and salad spread, a hot entrée buffet, a breakfast platter. Build them around your best sellers, not your whole menu.
• A minimum in dollars or headcount, stated up front.
• Lead time. "Order by 3pm the day before" is a promise she can plan around.
• Delivery radius and fee. Say where you deliver and what it costs.
• Dietary labels on every package. Vegetarian, gluten-free and dairy-free are the three she will be asked about.
• A way to order now. Online ordering with a date picker and payment is best. A phone number with a named person is acceptable. A generic contact form is where orders go to die.

If you need help with the menu side, read our guide to creating a catering menu. For the ordering path, see online catering ordering. Do not skip this step. Every later step sends people here.

Step 2: Build a prospect list of 100 businesses

Catering growth is local. Your best accounts are within the radius you can deliver to reliably, usually three to five miles. The goal of this step is a list of 100 businesses in that radius that plausibly buy food for groups, ranked by fit.

Where to find them:

• Google Maps. Search "office," "law firm," "medical," "dental," "insurance," "real estate," "coworking," "engineering," "accounting" within your radius and write down every result with a visible office.
• LinkedIn. Search companies by location and filter for 20 to 500 employees. The "People" tab shows office managers and executive assistants by name.
• Your own receipts. Business card orders, catering inquiries you never followed up on, regulars who mention their office.
• Office parks and medical buildings. One building can hold 15 tenants. Walk the directory in the lobby.
• The chamber of commerce member directory, which is public on most chamber websites.

Score each business on four things and sort by the total:

Use this worksheet, one row per business. A spreadsheet is fine.

The last three columns are the whole system. If nobody fills them in, the list is decoration. Start with the top 30 by score. You will work through the rest.

Step 3: Run outreach that gets a first order

One email does nothing. The businesses on your list get pitched constantly, and the office manager deletes anything that reads like a campaign. What works is a short, specific sequence from a real person, over about four weeks, that makes trying you easy.

The cadence for each prospect:

Email 1

Subject: Lunch for the team at [Company]

Hi Dana,

I run [Restaurant] on [Street], about a mile from your office. We cater team lunches and meetings for a few businesses nearby, and I'd like to be an option for [Company] too.

Our office packages run $14 to $22 a person, with boxed lunches or spreads, and we deliver with a day's notice. Menu is here: [link].

If you have a meeting coming up, I'd be glad to send a sampler over so the team can try us first. What day works?

[Your name] [Restaurant], [phone]

Call script, day 4

"Hi, this is [name] from [Restaurant] on [Street]. I sent Dana a note earlier this week about team lunches. Is she the right person for that, or does someone else handle food for meetings?"

If yes: "Great. I'm not trying to sell you anything on this call. I just want to know how you handle lunch for meetings now, so I can tell you honestly whether we'd be a fit."

Listen. Then: "Would it help if I dropped off a sampler next week? No charge, just so the team can taste it."

Email 2, day 8

Subject: Re: Lunch for the team at [Company]

Hi Dana, following up on this. If it's easier, the first order for [Company] is 10% off, or we'll add a dessert tray on us. Either way, here's the menu again: [link]. Happy to hold a delivery window for you.

Email 3, day 19

Subject: Thursday meetings

Dana, quick one. If [Company] does a standing team meeting, we can set up a recurring order so you never have to think about it. One email to change the headcount. Want me to send over what that looks like?

The drop-off matters more than any email. A tray in the break room with a menu on top does the pitch for you, and it gets remembered when the next meeting comes up. Keep it to what two people can carry.

Rules that make this work:

• Send from a named person, from a real address, with a phone number. Not "Catering Team."
• One ask per email. Sampler, menu, or a call. Not all three.
• Log every touch in the worksheet. The follow-up is what wins, and you cannot follow up on what you did not record.
• Do 10 to 15 new prospects a week. That is 150 or more touches a month once the sequences overlap, which is the pace that produces a first order in two to four weeks.

For a deeper look at the buyer's side, read how restaurants get corporate catering clients.

Step 4: Be findable when a buyer searches

Outreach creates demand. Search catches the demand that already exists. Some office manager near you is typing "office catering near me" this week, and if you are not on the first screen, someone else gets the order.

Google Business Profile. This is the highest-return hour you will spend.

• Add "Caterer" as a secondary category.
• Upload photos of actual group orders, trays and boxed lunches, not plated dine-in dishes.
• Put "catering for offices and events" in the description.
• Add the direct link to your catering page or ordering page.
• Reply to any review that mentions catering.

Your catering page. Title it "Catering in [City] | [Restaurant]" and make sure everything from Step 1 is on it. Include the neighborhoods and business districts you deliver to by name. One or two short posts, like a holiday catering guide or a boxed-lunch guide, help it rank.

Google Ads. Optional, and only after the ordering path works. Target "[city] catering," "office catering [city]," "boxed lunches [city]" and your cuisine plus "catering." $300 to $500 a month is enough to learn whether it converts. Send the click to the catering page, never the homepage. Judge it by accounts won, not clicks.

Social. Two or three catering posts a week, mixed into your normal content. Photos of real orders going out, a thank-you to the company that ordered, seasonal packages. Instagram reaches office managers. LinkedIn reaches the people who approve the budget.

In the restaurant. Your regulars work somewhere. A counter card that says "Feed your office. Ask us about catering," a line on the receipt, a flyer in every takeout bag, and a one-line staff prompt ("Do you ever need lunch for work?") cost almost nothing and reliably produce first orders from people who already trust the food.

Step 5: Turn first orders into accounts

This is where most restaurants stop, and it is where the money is. A first order is a trial. The account is won in the two weeks after it.

The follow-up sequence after every catering order:

Save what you learn: headcount, dietary needs, delivery instructions, who to call at the front desk, which package they liked. The next time they order, it should take them one message. Restaurants that do this end up with accounts that order monthly. Restaurants that don't are back to waiting for the phone.

Ask for referrals once an account has ordered three times. "Do you know another office nearby that orders lunch? We'll take $25 off your next order for the intro." One incentive, one action.

Your past inquiries count too. Anyone who asked about catering and didn't order, and anyone who ordered once more than 60 days ago, gets the win-back email this week. It is the fastest revenue in this whole guide.

Step 6: Track catering as its own business

If catering sales sit inside total restaurant sales, you cannot tell whether any of this is working. Track these weekly:

Our guide to tracking catering revenue covers the setup. A spreadsheet is enough to start.

The weekly operating plan

Catering growth fails when it depends on whoever remembers it during a busy shift. Give it a schedule and an owner. This is what a week looks like for one person spending five or six hours on it:

What to expect in the first 90 days

Weeks 1 to 2. Offer fixed, catering page live, Google Business Profile updated, worksheet built with the first 50 businesses, in-store signage up. Send the win-back email to past customers. You will likely get an order or two from that alone.

Weeks 2 to 4. Outreach running at 10 to 15 new prospects a week. First replies, a few samplers out. First new office orders typically land here, from the drop-offs and the win-backs.

Months 2 to 3. The sequences overlap and touches reach 150 or more a month. Follow-ups are producing second orders. This is when a pipeline of repeat accounts becomes visible, and when you can see which package, which neighborhood and which type of business is working. Double down there.

If nothing has landed by week six, the problem is almost always Step 1. Go back and order from your own catering page as if you were an office manager.

Where marketplaces fit

ezCater and similar marketplaces can bring orders you would not have found, especially early. The catch is that they charge commission on every order, including the tenth order from an account that would happily order from you directly, and the buyer's contact details stay with the platform. Our breakdown of ezCater's fees walks through what that costs on a $500 order and by monthly volume.

The sensible position: keep marketplace orders that are profitable, and run the system above so that repeat business moves to your own channel. If a marketplace is your entire catering program, read how to reduce ezCater dependence before you change anything.

When nobody has the hours

Everything in this guide is doable in five or six hours a week. The honest problem is that in most restaurants nobody has five spare hours, and the outreach is the first thing dropped when a line cook calls out. That is not a knowledge gap. It is an ownership gap.

Three ways to solve it:

1. Assign it. A manager or a trusted server owns the weekly plan, with the hours blocked and the tracking sheet reviewed by the owner every Friday.
2. Hire it. A part-time catering coordinator, if volume justifies it.
3. Outsource it. FlashCater runs this exact system for restaurants: the prospect list, the outreach, the Google campaigns, the in-store materials and the follow-up, for $400 a month with no commission. It suits restaurants that want the work done every week without adding headcount. The increase catering sales page explains what is included and what we need from you.

Whichever you choose, the sheet, the sequence and the schedule are the same.

Common questions

How do you grow a catering business from a restaurant?

Fix the offer first: three to five packages priced per person, a stated minimum and lead time, and a way to order without waiting for a callback. Then build a list of 100 businesses within your delivery range, contact each one several times over a month, and follow up with every buyer after their first order. Growth comes from repeat office accounts, not one-off events.

How do restaurants get more catering orders?

Most new catering orders come from five places: outreach to nearby offices, Google searches for local catering, regulars who did not know you cater, past catering customers, and referrals. Restaurants that grow work all five on a weekly schedule instead of waiting for the phone to ring.

What is the fastest way to increase catering sales?

Call and email every past catering customer who has not ordered in 60 days, and put a catering sign at the register. Both cost nothing and usually produce orders within two weeks. New office outreach takes longer, typically two to four weeks to a first order and two to three months to a steady pipeline.

What catering business growth strategies work best for restaurants?

Local business outreach, a catering page with packages and direct ordering, Google Business Profile optimization, in-store promotion, and a reorder follow-up sequence. Paid ads help once the ordering path converts. Marketplaces like ezCater can add volume but charge commission on every order, including repeat ones.

How do I get corporate catering clients?

Target the people who order food for groups: office managers, executive assistants, HR and operations leads at businesses with 20 or more employees within a few miles. Introduce yourself by email, follow up by phone, drop off a sampler, and offer a simple first-order incentive. Then treat every first order as the start of an account.

How much should a restaurant spend to grow catering?

The list, outreach, in-store signage and follow-up cost time more than money. If you add Google Ads, $300 to $500 a month on local catering searches is enough to learn whether they convert. A single office account ordering twice a month is worth several thousand dollars a year, so judge the budget against accounts won, not clicks.