How event planners choose caterers and where they look

Karina spent years in luxury hotel sales before we started SEOD, which means she sat on the other side of this conversation for a long time. Planners were not shopping for the most interesting menu. They were managing risk on behalf of a client who would blame them personally if anything went wrong.

That reframe changes what belongs on your page. A planner is not your guest. They are a professional buyer with a reputation on the line.

What does a planner check before they ever call?

Five things, roughly in this order, and food is not first.

Can you do the date and the headcount. If your page does not state a range, you are a phone call they may not make.

Are you insured. General liability, often with a specific coverage amount, and a certificate naming the venue as additional insured. Many venues will not let you through the door without it. If you carry it, say so on the page. It is the single most underused line on most catering sites.

Have you worked this kind of event before. Not this kind of food, this kind of event. A planner running a two hundred person conference lunch wants evidence of exactly that.

Do you have health permits and current licensing. Planners for corporate and public events get asked for this by their own clients.

Is anyone going to answer the phone. Planners work on compressed timelines with several vendors in play. Slow response is disqualifying long before it is annoying, because the planner is being chased by their own client.

Notice that none of those are about taste. Taste decides between the three caterers who cleared the list. It does not get you onto the list.

Where do planners actually look?

Venues first, always.

Every hotel, winery, museum, and event space keeps a preferred or approved vendor list. Getting on it is worth more than any amount of search visibility, because a planner working at that venue is handed the list before they think to search. Karina's experience on the hotel side is that these lists change less often than people expect and are usually maintained by one person who will talk to you if you ask well.

Second is their own history. Planners reuse vendors who made them look good, which is why the first event matters far more than the revenue on it suggests.

Third is peer referral. Planner communities are small and they talk.

Fourth is search, and this is where you can compete. A planner searching is filling a gap their list cannot cover. Dietary, cuisine, budget, or availability on a blocked date. That is a narrow, high intent search and it is what getting found for catering searches is about.

Planners also check your Google listing before they call, from a phone, during business hours. Wrong hours read as sloppiness. It is worth knowing why a restaurant can disappear from maps at the exact time people are looking, because a planner who cannot find you at four in the afternoon assumes you closed.

The phone part of that is getting harder, and it is not your fault. Sterling Sky's 2026 field data, compiled from Jepto tracking of 179 profiles across 34 US law firms over two years, shows clicks to call from Google Business Profiles declining even where rankings held steady. Website clicks did not fall the same way, because website icons appear on desktop while call buttons dominate mobile. Over the same period local pack ads went from roughly 1% of tracked mobile reports in early 2025 to around 22% by December 2025. The call button is being squeezed off the surface a planner is using. Put a direct phone number on the page itself rather than relying on the profile to carry it.

What is a spot on one venue's vendor list actually worth?

Here is the arithmetic, with inputs you should replace with your own.

Take one venue that hosts eight catered events a year at 120 guests, at $34 a head. That is $4,080 an event and $32,640 a year.

Food. The National Restaurant Association's 2025 Restaurant Operations Data Abstract, built on financial data from more than 900 operators nationwide, puts full service food and non alcohol beverage cost at a median of 32.0% of sales in 2024. On $32,640 that is $10,445.

Labor. A staffed 120 guest event is roughly ten hours of prep, three of packing and loading, twenty of onsite service across four people, and two of breakdown. Thirty five hours an event, so 280 hours a year. For loaded hourly cost, use the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for March 2026: accommodation and food services runs $19.92 in total compensation per hour worked against $16.12 in wages, a multiplier of 1.24 times base wage. At an $18 base that is $22.32 an hour, so 280 hours is $6,250.

Rentals, disposables, fuel and mileage. $350 an event, or $2,800 a year.

Contribution: $32,640 minus $10,445 minus $6,250 minus $2,800 is $13,145.

Convert it. The Association's cost analysis puts pre tax profit for a typical independent restaurant near 5% of sales, so a dollar of margin takes roughly twenty dollars of sales to produce. One venue list carries the margin equivalent of about $263,000 in additional dine in sales.

Now the cost of qualifying. General liability coverage at the level venues ask for, health permits, and whatever staffing you add. There is no credible published benchmark for catering liability insurance premiums, so get a real quote from your broker rather than working off a number you found online. Put your actual annual premium against the $13,145 above. In most markets the decision is not close, and that is the point of writing it down.

Run this for the three nearest venues that host events and have no kitchen.

Do planners find caterers through AI assistants?

Some do, and the numbers being sold to you about it are not real.

Two claims circulate in agency decks: that only 45% of businesses winning the Google map pack are recommended by AI assistants, and that just 12% of ChatGPT's citations match URLs on Google's first page. Neither has a traceable methodology. Both appear in vendor blogs with no sample size, no query set and no date.

What is actually measured is less convenient and more useful. A University of St. Gallen paper published in April 2026 ran identical prompts across ChatGPT, Gemini, Google AI Mode and Perplexity, daily for six weeks and repeatedly within a single day. Between consecutive days, only 34% to 42% of cited sources overlapped. Repeated runs of the same prompt on the same day shared only 32% to 43%, with ChatGPT the least stable. There is no rank inside an AI answer, so anyone selling you a position in one is selling a number that changes between two runs an hour apart.

The one practical action worth taking is cheap. Whitespark ran 153 queries across 17 local business categories in 9 US cities and documented the review sources attached to Bing Places listings, as a proxy for what a Bing grounded assistant sees. Facebook was the most common review source, on roughly 1.5x as many businesses as Yelp, with Yelp second and TripAdvisor third. That is a proxy rather than a measurement of any assistant, and the authors are candid: they asked ChatGPT to explain a map it had itself generated and it denied showing a map at all.

So: claim your Bing Places listing, keep your Facebook page current, and stop there. It costs an afternoon and there is no downside. Everything else here is a hedge, not a channel.

What should a page aimed at planners contain?

More than you would put on a page for a family, and organized so it can be skimmed.

Planners are professional skimmers. They will scan for the five screening items above, and if they find them, they will read the rest. That is why a long page works here when it would not elsewhere, and long pages sometimes convert better than short ones precisely in situations like this one, where the reader has specific questions and no patience for a page that withholds.

Put the operational facts in one block. Headcount range, delivery radius, lead time, insurance, permits, staffing availability, equipment you provide, equipment you do not. A planner reading that block can bid you without a call, and a caterer who can be bid without a call gets bid more often.

Then the proof. Real photos from real events at the scale you want.

Then the reviews, and this is where catering differs from dinner. A planner does not care about your dinner service reviews. They care about the handful of reviews that describe an event, and catering reviews come from a different person and require a different ask.

Finally, a direct contact. Not a form alone. A name, an email, and a phone number that reaches a person during weekday business hours, which is when planners work.

How do I get onto a venue's vendor list?

Ask the person who owns the list, and make their job easier.

Find out who maintains it. At a hotel it is usually the catering or events sales manager. At an independent venue it may be the general manager. That person is not gatekeeping for fun, they are protecting themselves from a bad vendor experience.

Bring what they need in one document. Insurance certificate, health permit, a sample menu with per person pricing, headcount range, lead time, and references from similar venues. Most caterers who ask for a spot send an introduction. Almost none send the packet the venue needs to say yes.

Then be reliable at the first event and tell them how it went. Venue staff hear about problems and rarely hear about successes.

Weddings deserve their own note. Planners and couples search differently, and wedding catering searches differ from corporate ones enough that a page written for one will underperform for the other.

Where does this break down?

Two places, and the first one is a scale problem.

When the event is bigger than your line. A staffed 120 guest event is thirty five labor hours that mostly land on a Saturday. If those hours come out of the crew running your dining room, you have moved a problem rather than won an account. Price the staffing separately and decide whether you are hiring event staff.

When the venue list is closed and stays closed. Some lists are exclusive contracts, some are three names deep and have been for a decade. Ask how the list is maintained and when it last changed. One honest answer saves you a season of unanswered emails.

What to do this week

List every venue within your delivery radius that hosts events and has no kitchen of its own. That list is short and it is the highest value list in your business.

Run the venue arithmetic on the top three with your own head price and hour count, against your real insurance quote.

Build the vendor packet. Insurance certificate, permit, sample menu with pricing, headcount range, references. One PDF and one web page, because venues forward both.

Add the operational block to your catering page. Fifteen minutes and it makes you biddable.

Then call three venues and ask who maintains their vendor list. Just that question, this week.

Want a planner's read on your catering page?

Email me at eric@seod.com with a link to your catering page and the type of event you want more of. Karina will read it the way she read vendor submissions in hotel sales, and I will send you back the specific reasons a planner would pass, in the order they would hit them.

It is usually three or four things, and it is usually insurance, headcount range, and the absence of an event photo. No pitch attached, and if the honest answer is that planner work is not the right business for your kitchen, we will tell you that.

There is more on catering and event business as well.