How to Promote a Catering Business

For years, catering delivery has been seen as a necessary expense to meet customer demand that drains labor and cuts into margins. But with the right infrastructure and partner strategy, we have seen how it can become a high-margin revenue engine. 

Prospects or customers often ask us how to grow a catering business and what frameworks they should use to reimagine catering delivery as a profit center.

What’s Holding Catering Delivery Back from Being Profitable?

Operators have historically carried the burden of managing, hiring, and paying in-house drivers. This is expensive and hard to scale, as in-house fleets come with a lot of fixed costs on top of drivers’ wages like:

• Delivery vehicles

• Vehicle maintenance

• Insurance

Whether your restaurant receives catering orders or not, you're still paying all these expenses. This can potentially mean big losses.

With only an in-house fleet, it’s the drivers who determine how many catering orders can be fulfilled in a day rather than kitchen capacity. Restaurant kitchens can produce far more orders than in-house drivers are able to deliver, which can lead restaurants to rely on drivers from on-demand, mealtime services or marketplace delivery platforms. 

Typical marketplace delivery platforms are expensive for restaurants as well. Hidden costs can include:

• Ownership of your data and customer experience

• Customers being driven away from first-party ordering platforms to third-party online catering platforms for future orders

• Poor execution from drivers who aren't trained on catering set ups, which reflects poorly on you.

The Financial Equation: How to Calculate Catering Delivery Profitability

Calculating the profitability of a catering delivery business comes down to knowing the critical metrics.

Here’s what we encourage our clients to track: 

• Delivery fee versus labor cost

• Refund rate

• On-time percentage

• Delivery coverage and ability to expand that coverage at will

• Overall fill rate

• Average order value (AOV)

• Net profit per order

By taking all these metrics into account and centralizing delivery with a true delivery partner, not just another vendor that essentially fulfills transactions and tracks costs per order, restaurants can protect their margins and net profit. 

Scaling Without the Overhead: Our Delivery Infrastructure

It’s often the case that you don’t know what you’re going to get with a driver from a typical online catering platform. We created DeliverThat to be different. We take great care to bring you driver consistency. All of our drivers have been vetted and are provided brand education specifically for the setup and presentation of large order catering, so you can count on each delivery to be professional and on-brand every time. 

In our experience, maintaining professional standards and brand image is how to promote a catering business most effectively, and it’s how we ensure shared success as a business partner. 

Consistency is the core of all our operations. It’s our promise to keep our charges predictable, only billing you for fulfilled deliveries. There’s no monthly, weekly, or other recurring payment just to keep your service through us active. 

When you have a hectic delivery schedule—say, orders that need to be picked up for delivery at 11 a.m., 11:15 a.m., and 11:30 a.m.—you can depend on us to have drivers there for you on time.  Even if something happens to one of our own drivers on the road, we have the scale and capacity to send a backup driver to complete the delivery, which is not always the case with other delivery vendors and in-house fleets.

Through our reliability in performance, presentation standards, and cost-efficiency, we can help you grow your catering business into a profit center. 

How to Grow a Catering Business with Proper Management

Myth: catering delivery can’t be profitable. 

Truth: It certainly can, and we see it happen all the time with our clients! 

It’s unmanaged catering delivery that can’t be profitable. Enterprise brands have the volume to make catering delivery work well, but it requires shifting from old assumptions and ways of doing things. 

As soon as you start to bring visibility, centralization, choice, and accountability into the process, you’ll find a margin you didn't know existed. Every dollar saved in delivery fees and refunds will go straight back to your bottom line, and then it comes down to what you do with the money you saved.

Stop Bleeding Money, Start Banking Margin

Catering delivery is no longer just the cost of doing business. It can be a controllable area shown to drive profit and customer satisfaction when treated with the same rigor and respect as any other revenue stream. It pays off in repeat business, in your business reviews, and in referrals, which means a sustainable revenue stream over time. 

DeliverThat acts as the connective tissue between a brand's off-premise channel and its guests. We give enterprise operators the ability to manage and orchestrate deliveries their way while protecting their brand standards and profitability, whether that means using our drivers, our network, or our CRM. 

We’re here to build a scalable infrastructure for the next decade of off-premise growth with you.

To learn more about integrating with DeliverThat, contact us!