Why your restaurant has no catering page and what it is costing you

I ran restaurants for sixteen years before this. Catering was never the thing anyone planned for. It arrived, we scrambled, we made it work, and nobody ever sat down to ask whether more of it could be arriving.

That is the whole problem. Catering is treated as something that happens to a restaurant rather than something a restaurant goes and gets.

Why do restaurants skip the catering page?

Three reasons, and all of them are understandable.

It feels like a different business. Dinner service is what you do. Catering is a side thing that shows up when an office manager calls. Building a whole page for it feels like overcommitting to something you have not decided to be serious about.

Nobody wants to publish prices. Catering pricing depends on headcount, menu, service style, and whether anyone has to drive it somewhere. Publishing a number feels like getting trapped by it, so most restaurants publish nothing.

The website was built for one job. Somebody built the site to show the menu, the hours, and the address. Catering was not in scope, and nobody has revisited the site since.

None of that is wrong. It just means the search happens somewhere else.

Is one catering order really worth more than a Friday section?

Run it and see. Replace every input with your own numbers.

Start with the section. Say a server's station turns thirty covers across a Friday night at a $25 average check per person. That is $750 of sales in that station for the evening.

I am using $25 because it is a real, audited, publicly filed figure rather than a guess. Darden Restaurants disclosed in its FY2026 10-K, filed 24 July 2026, that Olive Garden's average check per person, defined as total sales divided by number of entrées sold, was approximately $25.00. Cheesecake Factory's FY2025 10-K puts its average check at $31.79 including beverages and desserts. Use your own POS number instead. There is no published US average party size at all, and I looked: a full text search of SEC filings for the phrase returns nothing, and OpenTable states in its own 2026 methodology that it analysed party size across its US platform and then declines to publish the figure. Your point of sale system has your covers per ticket. That is the only version of this number worth using.

Contribution on the section. The National Restaurant Association's 2025 Restaurant Operations Data Abstract, based 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 and full service salaries and wages including benefits at a median of 36.5%. Applied to $750, that leaves roughly $236.

Now the catering order. Forty four people at $25 a head, delivered and set up, is $1,100.

Food at the same 32.0% is $352.

Labor is six hours across prep, packing, delivery and setup. For loaded hourly cost, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for March 2026 puts accommodation and food services at $19.92 in total compensation per hour worked against $16.12 in wages, which is 1.24 times base wage. At an $18 base that is $22.32 an hour, so six hours is $134.

Packaging, disposables and fuel, call it $65.

Contribution: $1,100 minus $352 minus $134 minus $65 is $549.

That one order carries more than twice the contribution of a busy Friday section, and it does not occupy a table. The catering labor is scheduled rather than standing, which is the part that does not show up when operators compare the two on gross sales alone.

Now 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. That $549 is the margin equivalent of about $11,000 in additional dine in sales. Two orders a month for a year is the equivalent of a quarter million dollars of covers you do not have room for.

What is actually being missed?

Here is what makes catering different from the rest of your business, and why it deserves its own page.

The buyer is actively looking. Nobody searches "restaurant near me" with a firm plan. Somebody searching "corporate catering" has a date, a headcount, and a budget. They are not browsing. They are shopping, and they will make a decision this week. Google's own research with Ipsos MediaCT and Purchased, fielded across 4,500 survey respondents and a seven day mobile diary of 3,431 smartphone searches in early 2014, found that 18% of local searches on a smartphone led to a purchase within a day against 7% of non local searches. That fieldwork is twelve years old and smartphone behavior has moved a long way since, so treat it as directional. The direction has not reversed.

The ticket is large. See the arithmetic above. The math on winning even a few more per month is not subtle.

They repeat. An office that finds a caterer it likes stops searching. You are not competing for one order, you are competing for the standing order.

Almost nobody is competing well. Your competitors have the same problem you do. In most markets, the restaurant that builds a genuinely useful catering page has very little standing in its way.

That last point is the one to sit with. This is not a crowded fight.

What about the catering market numbers I keep seeing?

Skip most of them, and here is why that matters when someone quotes them at you.

The figures in wide circulation say the US catering market is $58 billion, up from $37 billion in 2011, that catering is 11% of foodservice, and that the split is 63% consumer and 37% business. All of those come from a single Technomic multi client study that is paywalled, reported second hand through trade press, and now roughly nine years old. Nobody quoting them has read the primary document, including most of the agencies putting them in pitch decks.

The publicly checkable figure is smaller and more boring. IBISWorld's 2026 report on Catering Services in the US puts the industry at $15.7 billion across 13,644 businesses, growing at a 1.7% compound annual rate in business count between 2021 and 2026. IBISWorld is a paid market research publisher and only the headline figures are public.

And none of it should change what you do on Monday. A national market size is not an operating benchmark. It tells you nothing about whether four offices within a mile of your kitchen order lunch every Tuesday. There is also no published dataset of restaurant catering attach rates, catering channel margins, or average catering order values with a disclosed sample and method, which means anyone quoting you one is quoting a vendor's marketing. Your own order history is the only catering benchmark that exists for you.

What does a catering page need that a menu page does not?

A dinner menu answers one question: what do you serve. A catering buyer has a different list, and they will not call you until most of it is answered.

What can I actually order. Not your dinner menu. What travels, what holds, what serves twenty people. Formats, not dishes.

How many people. Minimums and maximums, stated plainly. This is the fastest way to disqualify the wrong inquiry and reassure the right one.

What does it roughly cost. A range, a per person figure, a starting point. Something. A buyer with a budget cannot proceed on a blank, and most will not call to find out. Publishing a range and how to do it without getting trapped is the single most common thing restaurants get wrong here.

How far ahead do I need to order. Lead time is the thing that kills orders after the fact. Say it before the conversation starts.

Do you deliver, set up, or just hand it over. These are three different services and buyers assume different defaults.

What happens next. One clear action. Not a general contact form, not an email address buried in a footer.

Why does the inquiry form matter more here?

Because a catering inquiry is not a reservation. It carries information, and the form either collects that information or wastes everyone's time.

A form that asks name, email, and message produces an inbox full of "do you cater?" and a week of back and forth before anyone knows whether the job is even possible.

A form that asks date, headcount, delivery or pickup, and any dietary constraints lets you answer with something real on the first reply. Faster answer, better impression, higher chance of the booking.

There is a balance. Every field costs you completions, so ask only what changes your answer. But catering is the one place where slightly more form is worth it, because the alternative is a conversation that goes nowhere.

The button text matters more than people think. "Submit" and "Contact us" both underperform something that names the thing the person came to do. Writing a call to action people actually act on is a small change with an outsized effect on a page like this.

Where should the page live?

Its own page, with its own address, linked from your main navigation.

Not a section of the contact page. Not a PDF. Not a paragraph on the about page. Search engines and AI systems both need something to point at when someone asks who caters in your area, and a buried paragraph is not that.

Where this advice breaks down is when the page exists and the operation does not. A catering page that promises setup, dietary labeling and same day quotes from a kitchen with one van and no capacity sheet will generate inquiries you decline and events you underserve. The page should describe the operation you have on a busy Friday, not the one you have on a quiet Tuesday.

The same logic applies to your ordering situation generally. If you have let a third party own the pages where your customers make decisions, you have handed away the relationship and the data. That is the same dynamic behind a delivery app outranking your own website, and catering is where it costs the most, because the orders are the largest.

What to do this week

Search your city plus "catering" and look at who comes up. Notice how many are actual restaurants with real pages, and how many are aggregators.

Then answer these on paper before anyone builds anything: minimum headcount, lead time, delivery radius, and a starting per person price. Those four answers are most of the page.

Pull your POS average check and covers per ticket, and run the section arithmetic above with your own numbers. It takes ten minutes and it usually settles the internal argument about whether catering is worth the disruption.

If you already take catering calls, look at what people ask before they book. That list is your page outline, written for you by your own customers.

Different event types come with different expectations, and wedding inquiries in particular behave nothing like corporate ones. Build for the type you actually want.

Want to know what your catering search looks like?

Email me at eric@seod.com with your restaurant name and city. I will search catering in your area, see where you land, and send you what I find. Screenshots, not a report.

I ran restaurants for sixteen years and I answer these myself, so if the honest read is that your kitchen should not be chasing catering right now, that is what you will get back. No pitch, no sequence.

Or keep reading more on catering and event business.