How to Start a Catering Business: 3 Key Focus Areas

A guest calls in an order for 40 people, two days before a company picnic. Is this a moment of opportunity or panic? If your team is scrambling through a spreadsheet, checking inventory by phone, and hoping someone writes it down correctly, let’s walk through how to get your catering program organized.

Demand for catering is soaring: not only do tickets average 10x mealtime tickets according to Olo data, but it’s also a great avenue for brand awareness and guest acquisition.

But starting catering isn’t as easy as flipping a switch or offering larger portions of your existing menu. A good catering program has the menu, the platform, and the operations dialed in. A great program also has someone actively selling it.

Not sure where your catering program stands? Take our catering maturity quiz to find out.

We've broken down three focus areas to help you lay the groundwork for a profitable catering business that consistently delivers a positive guest experience, order accuracy, and timely delivery. Here’s how to get started.

1. Strategy

First, align on the fundamentals of your brand's catering program: menu, pricing, and how you'll actually sell it. Here's how to tackle each area.

Menu & Pricing

Picture a guest opening a catering box after a 30-minute drive only to find the sauce has soaked through the packaging. Don't just take your dine-in menu and drop it into catering.

A catering menu should:

• Feature items that travel well and hold up at the right temperature. This might mean looking beyond your most popular dishes.
• Take presentation into account. Your food should still look like a nice meal by the time it reaches the table. Does your menu lend itself to buffet-style setups or personalization with individual boxed items?
• Include à la carte options to accommodate dietary restrictions.
• Make it easy for catering guests to know how much to order for their party size. Create tiered packages that specify how many people each covers and publish them on your site.
• Create incentives with drink and dessert add-ons. Let guests see the value of adding more.

Send email quotes before guests place an order to keep pricing transparent. Or, even better: send a branded PDF proposal with a secure payment link, so guests can self-serve the moment they have approval.

Sales & Marketing

Building your catering business comes down to three connected areas: marketing creates awareness, sales converts it, and guest engagement keeps it going.

Marketing gets catering in front of people. Go after catering-specific AEO/SEO keywords, add promotional banners to your website and app, and set up an enhanced redirect integration with Google so your catering menu shows up accurately wherever guests search for it. Use in-store signage, your website, and your packaging to inform guests that catering is an option.

Sales is what turns that visibility into bookings, and it's built on relationships: with your community, with local businesses, and with the people planning the graduation parties and office lunches in your area. First, decide who on your team owns catering sales in-store so there’s a clear point of contact. Then, define your target market and go build those relationships.

Your guest engagement platform earns its keep after the sale: following up, re-engaging guests who've gone quiet, and promoting seasonal catering campaigns.

Watch: Key Strategies for Building a Profitable Catering Program with Mendocino Farms and Cracker Barrel

2. Technology

With your menu, pricing, and sales and marketing plan in place, you can evaluate tech based on whether it gives you the tools to execute.

Ordering & Channels

Catering orders don’t always start on a website. They can start with a phone call to the store, an in-store inquiry (maybe after seeing your new signs?), or a text to a sales rep who a guest met at a community event last month. Your ordering platform needs to catch every one of those channels—website, mobile app, in-store, and call center—and feed them into the same system so nothing gets lost. It should also integrate directly with your POS to avoid manual entry.

Third-party marketplaces can increase visibility and drive incremental orders, but your direct channels are more profitable and let you retain the guest data you need for reporting and follow-up. Most brands treat marketplaces as a supplement rather than the main channel.

The Dashboard Behind Every Order

A catering sales manager's Tuesday might look like this: a nonprofit calls, needing a tax-exempt receipt for last week's order; a longtime account wants a house account set up ahead of the holiday season; and a lead from Saturday's community event still needs a follow-up email. Without a centralized dashboard, that's three browser tabs, a spreadsheet, and a sticky note.

A centralized dashboard gives catering sales managers a single place to manage house accounts (lines of credit for VIPs, which typically see 2x AOV), verify tax-exempt status, track leads, run reports, and view the full picture of guest data. That's what turns catering from a side project into a channel you can actually grow.

A big part of our catering strategy was upgrading to a platform that could integrate with a lot of POS systems. With Olo Catering+, we don’t have to ring in orders manually, so we’re giving back hours a day to our catering specialists, store operators, accounting team, and technology team.

Brian Pearson, CTO

Mendocino Farms

Case study: Discover how Paris Baguette boosted sales and efficiency with Olo Catering+

3. Operations

The prep list that worked when catering meant a handful of orders a week starts to break down once you're running twenty. Standardized recipes, packaging, and checklists are what let that same process hold up at ten times the volume.

Here’s what you’ll need from an operations standpoint to ensure accurate and timely handoffs.

Standardize your processes

Catering only scales if it's repeatable. Document your recipe standards, packaging standards, and prep checklists so that any shift can execute a catering order consistently every time.

Production sheets and pack slips can also help here. Production sheets calculate the quantity of each item, component, and ingredient needed for an order and should be printable so teams can reference them during prep. Pack slips are the quality check afterward: a checklist of everything included, so nothing gets left off the order before it goes out the door. Make sure both are printable, so teams can easily access them during order preparation in the kitchen.

Make time

Catering orders are typically placed 1-4 days in advance, which gives you room to plan for staffing and inventory. Configure catering lead times to 24+ hours so orders come in at least a day before pickup or delivery—you can work towards decreasing this as you scale. And as your program grows, add capacity management tools like order throttling to keep stores from getting overwhelmed during peak periods.

Olo has helped us grow from occasion-based catering to everyday catering by consolidating orders in one place and allowing us to throttle orders so stores aren't overwhelmed.

Diana Lawson

IT Product Owner, Online Ordering Systems, Cracker Barrel and Maple Street Biscuit Company

Packaging

Picture this: you order catering from a local spot on a friend's recommendation. The food is excellent, but the boxes have no branding at all. Great food and forgettable packaging is a missed marketing moment, not just a missed detail.

Catering packaging has a different job from your mealtime packaging. It needs to travel well, hold its temperature, and still look like a quality meal on arrival, since for many guests, catering is their first experience with your food. Label boxed lunches with guests' names where applicable, clearly mark common allergens on buffet setups, and use sustainable packaging whenever possible. Make sure your branding actually shows up on the box: unbranded catering means a guest can love your food and still have no idea who made it.

Fulfillment and delivery

Most catering orders are delivered, but designate an in-store area for guests who prefer to pick up. If your brand doesn't offer in-house delivery, third-party couriers can deliver orders placed through your direct channels without you absorbing hefty commission fees.

Next steps

Of course, these focus areas are simply the foundation of a profitable catering business. Here’s an interactive catering checklist of everything you need to build a guest-centric program.

For concrete tips to grow any catering program, download our Catering Growth Playbook. You’ll learn an action plan specific to your catering maturity, specific tactics to own guest relationships and maximize order value, and how to scale catering without overwhelming your operations.

Discover how Olo’s powerful Catering+ offering can help you implement, optimize, and maintain a digital-first catering program that benefits your guests, teams, and restaurant brand. Request a demo today.