How to Grow Catering Sales Without Hiring a Sales Team

You can grow catering sales without hiring by treating the catering salesperson's job as a list of tasks and giving every task an owner. Some tasks go to the owner or GM, some to software, some to a part-time coordinator or a marketplace, and the selling itself can go to a managed sales service. What doesn't work is hoping someone finds the time. Catering grows when finding buyers, answering inquiries, quoting, following up and winning reorders happen every week, whoever or whatever does them.

The decision here is whether to hire a catering salesperson now, and if not, which mix of options covers the work at a cost your orders can carry. It is part of our guide to restaurant catering revenue.

What does a catering salesperson actually do each week?

Take the job title away and a catering salesperson does nine things. The hours below are illustrative, for one location building a catering channel from a standing start. They are our estimates to show the shape of the job, not a benchmark. Your volume, menu and market will move them.

Two things stand out. About half of those hours are selling (the list, the outreach, the follow-up, the reorder) rather than order handling. Restaurants without a catering sales team usually cover the order handling somehow and skip the selling. And the work arrives at awkward times: inquiries come in the evening, and outreach gets pushed aside by every shift that runs short.

How much does a catering sales manager cost?

"Catering sales manager" isn't its own federal job category, but the closest ones are. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates for May 2025 put the annual mean wage of sales managers employed by restaurants at $67,150, with a median of $56,460. Meeting and event planners employed by restaurants, closer to a catering coordinator, averaged $59,980 a year, about $29 an hour. These wage figures already include commissions, so don't add a commission on top of them. They don't include overtime, benefits or the employer's payroll taxes, and pay varies a lot by market. A new hire also needs months to build a pipeline before the orders arrive.

The less visible cost is risk. A salaried hire is a fixed cost before the orders exist, and when they leave, the relationships can leave with them. "With that turnover comes a relationship turnover," Nicole Jackson, then CoreLife Eatery's director of catering and off-premise business, told Restaurant Dive in 2019, in an article that made the case for dedicated catering teams. The same article reported a Technomic and ezCater study in which 34% of restaurant leaders said they were investing in hiring people for catering, and 34% named hiring staff as one of their biggest catering challenges.

Worked example: Here is the break-even test for a hire. Say a catering salesperson costs you $70,000 a year once payroll taxes and benefits are added to a wage near the BLS median. Say each extra catering order is $416, the 2025 average catering order MONKEY reported, and leaves $150 after food, packaging, kitchen labor, delivery and card processing. The $70,000 and the $150 are assumptions; use your own. The hire pays for themselves at about 467 extra orders a year, or roughly nine more catering orders every week, before adding a dollar of profit. For a location doing two or three catering orders a week, that means growing to eleven or twelve a week just to break even, and that's after the months it takes them to get going.

That is why a full-time catering hire usually makes sense for a multi-unit group with steady volume, and rarely for a single location that is starting out. Below that line, the job still has to be done. The same $150-an-order test works for every option below: divide what the option costs you in a year by $150 (or your own figure) to see how many extra orders it has to bring in.

Five ways to cover catering sales without hiring

1. Owner or GM time, on a fixed weekly block

• The work it covers: whatever fits in the block. Two mornings a week, about 8 hours, covers the list, a first round of outreach and the follow-ups, but rarely evening inquiries.
• The full cost: no new check, but those hours come out of running the restaurant. Price them at the manager's hourly cost to compare honestly.
• Where it fails: the first week the kitchen is short.

Best for a single location testing whether the demand is there, with someone reviewing the numbers every Friday.

2. A part-time coordinator or a manager with protected hours

• The work it covers: order handling, which is about 8 to 14 of the hours in the table: inquiries, quotes, follow-up, confirmations, invoices and the kitchen handoff. Outbound selling is a different skill, and it is usually the part that still doesn't happen.
• The full cost: wages for the hours you schedule, plus payroll taxes and the time it takes you to manage them.

Worked example: Say you schedule a coordinator for 15 hours a week at about $29 an hour, the BLS event-planner figure above. That is $435 a week, or about $22,600 a year in wages before payroll taxes. At $150 an order, the coordinator covers their wages if faster replies and steady follow-up win about 151 orders a year that you would otherwise lose, roughly three a week.

Best for a location with steady inbound volume that is losing orders to slow replies.

3. Catering marketplaces

• The work it covers: bringing buyers who are already looking and taking the order, with little sales effort from you.
• The full cost: 15 to 30% commission on catering orders, repeat orders included. Say a marketplace brings 100 orders a year at $416 and charges 20%: that is $8,320 in commission, or about $83 an order, which comes out of what each order would otherwise leave (less any delivery or card processing the marketplace covers).
• What to check: the agreement's terms on what customer details you receive, whether you may contact those buyers yourself, and how they reorder.

Marketplaces are taking a bigger share of the channel. MONKEY's State of Catering data shows marketplaces' share of catering orders rising from 12.8% in 2021 to a projected 36% in 2026. They are a reasonable way to prove demand for your catering menu and a source of first orders. ezCater alternatives for restaurants covers the trade-off in more depth.

4. Catering software and automation

• The work it covers: the admin hours. Online ordering, quoting tools, a CRM and email sequences mean an order form captures headcount and dietary needs once, a quote template keeps pricing consistent, reminders fire on every open quote, and a list shows which accounts haven't reordered. Some products also include lead capture and marketing campaigns.
• The full cost: a subscription or per-order fee, plus the staff hours to run it. Software can send the sequence, but your team still decides who to contact, writes or approves the messages and makes the calls.

Best for restaurants with a person who will run it every week.

5. A managed sales service

• The work it covers: the selling itself, on top of order handling. Kutlerri.ai's Catering Sales Agent is one example. Kutlerri runs it as a managed service, with its own sales team behind the agent:
  • It finds catering-fit businesses within 30 miles of each location, and the person who places the order.
  • It runs outreach by email, calls and texts.
  • Its Inbound Voice Assistant answers your catering line, and the agent replies by email, text and web form. A website chatbot is coming soon.
  • It drafts quotes and invoices. You approve every quote.
• The full cost: Kutlerri charges a percentage of the catering orders it generates, rather than a salary or a software subscription. Ask for the rate at your expected volume and run it through the same per-order test: a percentage fee comes out of each order's $150 the same way a commission does, but only on orders the service brings in. Add your own time approving quotes and your kitchen's time filling the orders.
• The trade-off: an outside team speaks for your restaurant, so you need to be comfortable with how it represents you.

For one example, RASA, a five-location fast-casual brand, closed $450K in new catering revenue in 10 months with the agent, with no new hires; the RASA case study describes one customer's result, not a typical outcome.

The five options side by side

Whichever mix you choose, ask the same four questions about the customers it brings: Can you see and export each buyer's contact details and order history? What marketing permission do you have to contact them yourself? When they reorder, do they order through you or through a platform, and does that order carry a fee? What does the agreement allow, including after you stop using it?

Most restaurants end up with a mix: a marketplace for first orders, software for order handling, and one clear owner, a person or a service, for the selling. For a wider look at the tools themselves, see catering marketplaces vs. catering software vs. AI sales agents.

Catering automation: what to automate and what to keep human

Catering automation pays off on anything that should happen on a schedule. It falls short on anything that needs judgment about price, capacity or a customer's mood.

How to choose the right option

1. Count the work. For two weeks, log every catering inquiry, quote and order, and the time each one took. Compare it with the task table above.
2. Find the gap. Most restaurants already handle inquiries and orders, somehow. The gap is usually outbound, follow-up and reorders. If you aren't sure where orders slip away today, start with why restaurants lose catering revenue.
3. Price every option the same way. Put each option's full yearly cost over what one extra order leaves, as in the examples above. If the extra orders an option needs each week are more than your channel can realistically add, it isn't the right option yet. How much revenue catering can add to a restaurant shows how to size that number.
4. Give every task an owner, whether a person, a tool or a service, and write it down.
5. Review five numbers every week: inquiries, response time, quotes sent, quote-to-order rate and accounts reordering. If outbound is the gap, how to get catering leads covers twelve ways to build the list.

The short version

A catering salesperson's job is a set of tasks, and every one of them can be owned without a full-time sales hire: order handling by a coordinator and good software, first orders by a marketplace, and the selling by you on a fixed schedule or by a managed service. Price each one by what it costs per extra order, and hire when the break-even math says the channel can carry the role. Until then, the rule is simple: no task without an owner, and no week without the numbers.