Large, upscale events offer restaurants the opportunity to supplement their revenue with corporate catering. If you're in a major city like NYC, you can even make catering the core of your operations.
But how do you go from serving patrons to fulfilling large catering orders?
We're going to walk you through six steps that owners can follow to begin offering their own corporate catering services.
6 Steps to Begin Offering Catering for Large Events
1. Create Your Own Production Audit
Your kitchen's current production will dictate your current ability to offer catering. Ask yourself the following questions:
- Do your chefs have a lot of downtime?
- Are there periods of the day when your equipment is not being fully utilized?
- Are there opportunities to maximize equipment usage or add new equipment?
If your kitchen has the capacity to handle 75 meals an hour and is producing just 40, this is an indicator that you may be a good candidate for catering. You can also consider inventory turnover, staff capacity and equipment capacity.
Restaurants that are only open for breakfast, lunch or dinner may want to start small.
Are you slow on Tuesday? If so, offer catering on Tuesday and reassess if this is a good option for your restaurant after the first few orders. You can then begin refining your processes so that you can scale your catering up in the future.
If you take on more orders than you can handle, especially for festivals or major events, your reputation may suffer. Missing a single event or not providing the service your customer expects can impact future business.
Once you're through this integral step, it's time to refocus your attention to your kitchen equipment.
2. Strategically Upgrade Your Equipment
Commercial-grade kitchens help you handle large-volume orders and make more money. If you have all new equipment, there's less of a risk of it breaking down. But if you've been considering an upgrade to your equipment, now is the time to do it.
You don't need to upgrade everything at once.
Instead, spend your time focusing on equipment upgrades that matter the most:
- Ovens or grills: Single-stack ovens may be upgraded to a two-stack oven. Grills? Flat top grills with larger surfaces are another good option.
- Appliances: Your eatery is unique, but if you use the food processor a lot, consider a commercial-grade one. Inventory your appliances and make a list of items you'll need to upgrade or purchase additional units.
Once you have your integral equipment updated, move on to things like your warming units, induction burners, prep tables and automatic cookers.
Your goal for all upgrades is to increase your production capacity. Upgrading a small grill to a large one may boost production by 50%, which allows you to handle your in-house and catering offers.
If you don't have the budget for this point, you can then skip over to the next point and revisit this one when more revenue starts coming in.
3. Refine Your Processes to Streamline Operations
What's the difference between a successful catering operation and one that fails? Processes. Scalable processes need to be put in place, especially as you grow. You're likely to optimize all of this again and again over time.
And with that in mind, try to standardize:
- Cooking in batches: Batch cooking is a great way to keep all of your meals on hand for catering and in-house events. For example, you can cook large volumes of soups, salads or sauces.
- Ingredient sourcing and inventory: What ingredients can you use across dishes to reduce ingredient waste? You want to reuse ingredients that are often discarded so that you reduce waste and improve profits. Offer chicken sandwiches? You have most of the ingredients for a chicken salad that you can offer at events, too.
- Assembly: Multiple staff members must work in unison to make your catering events a success. One team may handle the cooking, another the packing and double-checking that orders are proper, and another the cleanup.
Over time, add your own standard operating procedures and guides that you - or anyone else - can follow. Your goal is to maintain continuity even if an integral part of your team departs in the future.
4. Review Your Staffing
Your catering requires reliable staff members. If you're already short-staffed, you'll want to wait before launching a catering service. Hire new full-time and even temporary staff from agencies to fill in production gaps.
You can also:
- Train staff on how to optimize production
- Assign team leaders who can oversee all of your operations
If you have strong staff, they'll be your catering operation's most integral component. Staff who are on the ball will help you overcome many issues you experience while catering.
5. Develop a "Smart" Catering Menu
Your catering menu must leverage your strengths. Offer dishes that hold well and are fine for transporting. Catering companies will prune back larger menus to just core items that are:
- Easy to transport
- Offer high profit margins
Work with your head chef to develop the menu. You can use your historical sales to pinpoint which menu items are most likely to sell and then just be sure they transport well.
You must consider how you'll pack the food for transport, which may mean working with suppliers to find unique solutions.
6. Market Your Services
Good food sells. You'll want to market your services and try to secure a few catering contracts for corporations. Corporate catering is one of the most profitable and you may be able to secure recurring contracts.
You can market your services through:
- Local ads
- Social media
- Cold calling
- Billboards
- Sending fliers to companies in your area
Even large capacity restaurants will struggle to offer catering at high volumes if they don't follow a strategic plan. Start with too much ambition and you may harm future business, so take it slow and scale up operations over time.
Adding corporate lunch catering or catering for large groups can augment your revenue, just take it slow and focus on customer satisfaction.