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The Ultimate Catering Playbook for Restaurants

Catering orders average 9 to 10 times more than a regular order. This free guide walks you through how to build, price, and market a catering program that fits your kitchen and keeps customers coming back.

You’ll receive:

  • A practical framework for building catering packages customers can find, understand, and order on their own
  • A simple pricing formula that covers your real costs so every order is profitable from day one, no matter how you manage it
  • A marketing plan you can act on with the time and budget you already have
Run a catering program that’s easy to manage and built to repeat.

 

 

What is the Ultimate
Catering Playbook
for Restaurants?

Most restaurants that do catering are leaving money on the table because the process is too manual, the pricing is guesswork, and there’s no system to turn a one-time order into a regular account.

The Ultimate Catering Playbook is a practical guide for restaurant operators who want catering to feel organized and repeatable. It walks through how to build the right packages, price orders so they’re profitable, keep fulfillment running smoothly, and turn a first catering order into the next one.

Whether you’re new to catering or tightening a process that’s grown over time, this gives you a framework you can act on immediately — and a clear picture of how the right technology can take it further.

What’s Inside the Catering Playbook

  • The business case for catering, including why order timing and size make it one of the most efficient revenue opportunities for independent restaurants.
  • A step-by-step guide to building 3 to 5 catering packages your customers can understand and order in under a minute, on their own schedule.
  • A simple pricing formula that accounts for food cost, packaging, labor, and delivery so every order lands at a number that works for your business.
  • A Catering Readiness Checklist covering menu, pricing, operations, marketing, and online ordering so your team feels confident before you go live.

How to Use the Catering Playbook

  • Start with the business case section to get clear on whether catering makes sense for your restaurant right now and what kind of volume is realistic.
  • Use the package framework to decide what you’ll offer before you announce anything publicly.
  • Run your numbers through the pricing formula before you set prices so every order is profitable from day one.
  • Keep the readiness checklist on hand as a final step before you launch or update your catering setup.

 

 

A full guide covering catering packages, pricing, operations, and marketing, plus a printable Catering Readiness Checklist you can use to prep your team before launch.

 

Both. If you’re just getting started, it gives you a clear first setup. If you’re already doing catering manually or through a marketplace, it helps you tighten the process and keep more of what you earn.

 

Start with your true cost: food, packaging, labor, and delivery or setup. Then build in a margin that makes the order worth your team’s time. At a $360 average catering order value, a well-priced program nets significantly more per hour than standard service. The playbook includes a simple formula and real examples to walk you through it.

 

Your best catering customers are often already ordering from you. The guide covers practical ways to make catering visible: adding a catering link to your website and Google Business Profile, and a one-paragraph outreach email you can send to nearby businesses today.

 

When orders come through your own direct channel, you keep more margin and you own the customer data. That makes it easy to follow up and turn one catering order into a regular account.