How can restaurants feel confident in adding more catering partners without damaging the operation?
The importance of catering is on the rise. According to Expert Market Research, the U.S. catering market reached nearly $73 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach $124 billion by 2032.
Catering is more profitable for restaurants because it’s more labor and product efficient due to its predictability. Most restaurants also generate catering revenue before the location even opens to the public. It’s clear that catering is a significant revenue driver rather than a supplementary service, so why aren’t restaurants working with as many catering companies as possible?
The challenge of modern catering is that each catering partner operates differently. Some partners provide restaurants with easy-to-print labels while others do not.’. Some allow customers to place orders 90 minutes before pickup and others send the order the night before.
These complex logistics make catering difficult for every operation. Managers devote tons of time to organizing and communicating these orders. Kitchen teams need to work through different order instruction sheets, labels and time constraints. This scrambling negatively affects food quality and kitchen culture, leading to late deliveries, and increasing the number of missed items. This can result in bad reviews and, in the worst case, getting off boarded from catering partners. These are just a few reasons why restaurants work with only one or maybe two catering partners. But this approach leaves a lot of money on the table.
We estimate that each catering partner can add over $6K of revenue per location every month. This means that adding three catering partners to your operation can result in $216,000 in additional revenue every year across every location. So how can restaurants feel confident in adding more catering partners without damaging the operation?
Introducing ByteCater: Your comprehensive catering solution
ByteCater was designed to address these challenges head-on. Using ByteCater is like having an all-star catering specialist in every location. On-site managers and supervisors login to ByteCater through any laptop and immediately access a centralized catering dashboard that has all catering orders (across different catering partners) from today to the next 3 months. Having one source of truth for catering orders boosts efficiency, accuracy, ratings, and repeat orders. Our customers have been able to increase their catering revenue by 3.5 times because their operation can now handle increased volume.
Below are some of the key features and benefits that make ByteCater so powerful.
Streamlined order management: By consolidating all catering orders into a single platform, managers can view all upcoming and previous orders, which saves time tracking and communicating orders to the team. No more time spent combing through emails and creating your own internal calendars. Restaurants can also view special requests and make updates to orders in real-time, reducing errors from last-minute order updates.
Automatic all-day calculations:Quick, accurate all-day counts are vital to restaurants when busy. ByteCater adds up the number of dishes, sides, and smaller items like sauces across all your catering partners. The platform also tells you how much of a specific ingredient is needed to fulfill the day’s orders. This removes the need for manual all-day calculations, takes away the guesswork for how much to prep, and helps avoid last minute trips to the grocery store to buy that item you are low on.
Efficient pickup: Coordinating pickup for 75 items between 3 different delivery drivers can be tricky. Oftentimes a manager or supervisor needs to organize and count every item at least twice. ByteCater provides a snapshot of how much of a menu item is needed by pickup time and by catering vendor. This leads to more accurate orders delivered on time, which results in higher ratings and more repeat orders.
Auto-generated labels: ByteCater automatically creates labels for the catering partners that don’t provide any (like ezCater). Users can customize their labels to include logos or other desired information. Instead of working with hand-written labels or no labels at all, the kitchen team can work quicker and more efficiently with these standardized labels. Having well designed labels also reinforces the care and attention to detail necessary to put together a catering order that wows the customer.
Manage direct catering orders: Coordinating directly with a customer for catering puts the most money in your pocket, but it comes with its own communication and logistical challenges. With ByteCater, you can upload and/or create orders on the platform to ensure calculations, labels, and communication are all taken care of. This helps reduce the administrative side of first-party catering in a meaningful way.
These are just a few of the powerful features at the disposal of ByteCater customers. There are delivery integrations, calendar views and email/text alerts also included on the platform.
If you’re looking to add more catering partners to your operation, or simply hoping to streamline your catering processes, don’t hesitate to reach out to us through our website.
There are no hardware fees and anyone can take advantage of our 2-week free trial period by reaching out for a demo through here.
