How to get catering orders for your restaurant

Most restaurants that "do catering" are waiting for it. A regular asks if you cater, someone calls from an office down the street, a big job shows up every couple of months. A post on r/restaurantowners describes it exactly: a few hundred dollars a week in catering, random big jobs, and no marketing behind it.

Getting catering orders on purpose comes down to four things. You need a buyer who knows you cater, an offer they can say yes to quickly, a way for them to ask, and someone who answers fast. Miss any one and the other three are wasted.

This guide walks through each piece in the order that matters.

Who actually orders catering

Before you spend a dollar, get clear on the person placing the order. It is rarely the person eating.

• Office managers and executive assistants. They order team lunches, meeting food and recurring meal programs. They care about on-time delivery, dietary labels and an invoice that does not create work.
• Pharmaceutical and medical sales reps. They buy lunches for clinics and practices as part of their job, often weekly.
• Event planners and HR teams. Holiday parties, offsites, trainings, onboarding days.
• Private hosts. Birthdays, graduations, rehearsal dinners, showers, memorials.

The workplace buyer is the steady one. ezCater's 2026 data puts the average workplace catering order at about $430 for 26 people, and 30% of those orders come with less than 24 hours of notice (Food On Demand, June 2026). In the same research, 91% of workplaces said they planned to spend the same or more on food in 2026 (ezCater, May 2026).

That tells you two things. The demand is there, and the restaurant that can answer and confirm quickly gets a real share of it.

Step 1: Build an offer a buyer can approve in one read

An office manager comparing three restaurants is not reading your full menu. They need to know, in one screen:

1. What they get (packages, not a list of 60 dishes)
2. How many people it feeds
3. Price per person or per package
4. Minimum order and lead time
5. Delivery area and fee
6. Dietary options (vegetarian, gluten free, labeled)

Packages win because they remove math for the buyer. "Taco bar for 20, $18 per person, includes two proteins, rice, beans, salsa trio, chips and serving utensils" can be approved in a Slack message to a boss. A PDF of your dine-in menu cannot.

ezCater reported that more descriptive menus get twice as many bookings on its marketplace, with photos, multiple dietary options, drinks, desserts, and both individual and tray packaging among the traits of top listings (ezCater, May 2026). The same logic applies to your own catering page.

For the full build, see how to design a catering menu that sells and how much to charge for catering per person.

Step 2: Make it obvious that you cater

Your own customers are the cheapest catering leads you will ever get, and most of them do not know you cater. Fix that first:

• A "Catering" link in the main navigation of your website, going to a page with the packages, not a phone number alone.
• A catering line on every takeout bag, receipt and delivery order.
• The Caterer category and a catering link on your Google Business Profile (full walkthrough here).
• A line in your staff's script when a table mentions an office, a party or an event.

None of this costs money. All of it is skipped by most restaurants.

Step 3: Go where the buyers are

Once the offer is clear, you reach buyers three ways. Most restaurants should run at least two.

Direct outreach to nearby offices

Make a list of offices, clinics, dealerships, schools and coworking spaces within your delivery radius. Find the office manager or the person who orders lunch. Bring a sample tray with a one-page menu, then follow up within two days. It is slow, but a single office that orders every other week is worth more than a dozen one-off parties. The full playbook is in how to get corporate catering clients.

Marketplaces

ezCater, DoorDash and others put you in front of buyers who are already searching. The trade-off is commission and the fact that the customer relationship belongs mostly to the platform. ezCater charges 15% on marketplace orders plus 2.99% payment processing, per its 2026 Getting Started Guide for restaurant partners. We break down when that is worth paying in ezCater vs direct catering orders.

Paid ads aimed at people planning an event

Meta ads (Facebook and Instagram) let you put a catering offer in front of people near your restaurant who match office and event-planning profiles, and collect their date, headcount and event type in a short form. Done right, the restaurant gets a steady flow of catering inquiries it owns outright. Done wrong, it gets a pile of names that never answer. See how to run catering Facebook ads that bring real inquiries.

Step 4: Answer before someone else does

This is where most catering revenue is lost, and it costs nothing to fix.

A 2026 study that submitted 807 private-event inquiries to restaurants and venues found that only 13% got a reply from a person within an hour, 19% never got a human reply at all, and the median wait was 23.6 hours (Hermetic AI, 2026). That is a vendor study, so read it as directional, but it matches what Harvard Business Review found across industries: companies that contacted a lead within an hour were nearly seven times more likely to qualify it than those that waited even one more hour (HBR, 2011).

Catering buyers often ask three restaurants at once. The first one to call back with a clear answer usually wins. Set a rule: every catering inquiry gets a call or text within one business hour, from a named person, with a quote or a next step. More on scripts and setup in how to respond to catering inquiries.

Step 5: Turn the first order into a standing order

The first order is the expensive one. The second, fifth and twentieth from the same office are where catering pays.

• Call the day after delivery. Ask what worked and what to change.
• Offer a recurring slot ("Every other Thursday for your team meeting?").
• Keep a simple list of every catering customer: company, contact, last order, typical headcount. Reach out before their usual date.

There is a second payoff. In ezCater's 2026 survey, 62% of employees who first tried a restaurant through a workplace meal later ordered from it in their personal lives (ezCater, May 2026). Every tray is a sample handed to 20 or more potential regulars.

Step 6: Track every inquiry like a deal

If catering inquiries live in a mix of voicemails, DMs and a manager's inbox, you cannot tell what is working. Put each one in a simple pipeline with stages: New, Contacted, In conversation, Quoted, Won, Lost. Once a week, look at three numbers:

1. How many inquiries came in, and from where
2. How fast each one got a first reply
3. How many turned into booked orders

Those three numbers tell you whether you have a demand problem (not enough inquiries), a speed problem (slow replies) or an offer problem (quotes that do not close). Each has a different fix.

A simple 30-day starting plan

Common questions

How long does it take to get catering orders going?

Your existing customers can start ordering as soon as they know you cater. Outreach to offices usually takes a few touches before the first order. Paid ads can produce inquiries within days of launch, but closing them still depends on how fast and how well you answer.

Should I start with ezCater or with my own catering program?

Many restaurants do both: a marketplace for buyers already searching, and a direct program for accounts you want to keep. The ezCater comparison has the fee math.

What is a good first catering offer?

A package for 10 to 25 people, priced per person, with clear dietary labels and a reasonable minimum. Lunch is the most common workplace catering occasion; 90% of orderers in ezCater's 2026 data named it.

Do I need a catering manager?

Not to start. You need one person who owns the inquiries and answers them fast. A dedicated role makes sense once catering is a meaningful share of sales.

Where ModernClicks fits

We build the demand and inquiry side of this for independent restaurants: Meta ads aimed at people planning office lunches and events, a short form that asks for date, headcount, event type and budget, and every inquiry delivered to your pipeline with an instant alert so your team can call back fast. If you can cook and deliver for groups and want more catering inquiries, book a call and we will tell you honestly whether it fits.