How to Get Catering Leads for Your Restaurant: 12 Methods That Work

The cheapest catering leads are the ones you already have. This week, answer every catering inquiry within the hour, contact the people who ordered catering before and have gone quiet, and pull the large group orders out of your order history. Those three cost staff time, not money. Next, fix your catering page and Google listing so a buyer can order without a phone call. Go after businesses that don't know you yet only once the kitchen has room for more orders.

The twelve methods below are grouped that way: people who already buy from you, people searching for catering now, and businesses that don't know you yet. They are one part of running catering as a revenue channel. CaterZen founder Michael Attias put the job plainly to Fast Casual: "Catering is a sales business." He boils growth down to three questions: "Who should be buying from us that isn't, who used to buy from us that we need to bring back, and who already buys from us that could be buying more?"

Catering lead methods compared

Ratings are our rough judgment for a single-location restaurant that already has a catering menu. They aren't measured data, and your market will move them.

Where to start

Pick the row that sounds like your restaurant:

• No time and no budget: methods 7, 3 and 2, in that order, then 1 and 4. Answering fast decides whether the leads you already get become orders; the other two hand you warm names in an afternoon.
• A catering menu but few orders: fix methods 5 to 7 before you chase anyone new. There's no point finding leads if inquiries go unanswered or the page can't take an order.
• Room in the kitchen for several more catering orders a week: add the list, the outreach and the tasting boxes (methods 9 to 11), or hand outbound off.
• You need volume fast and can live with the margin: a marketplace (method 8), with the commission tracked per order.

Leads from people who already buy from you

1. Tell your dine-in and takeout guests you cater

Your guests already like the food. Plenty of them also order lunch for an office, plan a birthday or run a school fundraiser. They just don't know you cater.

• Put a catering menu card in every takeout and delivery bag you pack.
• Add one line to the bottom of every receipt: "Feeding a team? Catering from $[price] a person at [your URL]."
• Put a QR code to your catering page on table tents and at the register.
• Give counter staff one question for any large takeout order: "Is this for a work lunch? We do catering, too."

Effort: low, an afternoon plus printing. Reaches: regulars who buy food for work, family events and community groups.

2. Find the hidden catering buyers in your order history

Somebody may already be feeding a group from your regular menu. Export your POS and online orders for the last few months and sort by order size. The top of that list is people catering with your takeout menu.

Look for repeat names, company email addresses, corporate cards and delivery addresses in office buildings. Then reach out personally, using the contact details they gave you when they ordered and with an easy way to opt out: "I noticed you order for your team every couple of weeks. We have a catering menu built for groups, packed per person, and we can invoice your office if that's easier."

Effort: low, a couple of hours with a spreadsheet. Reaches: people already buying group meals from you without a catering menu.

3. Win back lapsed catering customers

Past catering customers know your food and how you deliver. Pull everyone who ordered catering before but hasn't in the last two or three months, plus anyone whose event recurs: the quarterly planning meeting, the annual holiday party. The RASA case study describes the same move: flag past customers who have gone quiet, plus those due to reorder, such as a team that ordered for a planning meeting the previous March.

Send a short personal note from the owner or manager, not a blast. Mention what they ordered last time and give a reason to order now.

Effort: low. Reaches: buyers who already trust you.

4. Turn every catering order into a referral and a reorder

Repeat buyers carry catering. MONKEY's 2026 State of Catering data, reported by Food On Demand, found that "60 percent of catering orders come from just 5 percent of customers." The order you delivered today is your best lead for the next one.

• Check in the day after the event: did everything arrive right, and how did it go?
• Ask: "Who else in your building orders food for meetings?" Office managers talk to each other.
• Put a reminder on your calendar for their next likely event, and send the menu a week or two before it.

Our catering follow-up email templates cover the check-in, the referral ask and the reorder reminder.

Effort: low, ongoing. Reaches: recent buyers and the people they work with.

Leads from people searching for catering now

5. Make your catering page easy to order from

A catering page should answer a buyer's questions without a phone call, and it should let them order. Friction costs orders even after someone starts: MONKEY's State of Catering 2026 page reports that "43% of catering carts are abandoned before checkout."

Your catering page should show:

• packages with per-person prices (the catering pricing calculator gives you a starting price from your food cost)
• the minimum headcount and how much notice you need
• your delivery area, delivery fees and setup options
• dietary information your kitchen has checked, and photos of real catering spreads
• a short order or inquiry form (start from our catering order form template) and one phone number that reaches someone who can quote

Effort: medium, mostly once. Reaches: buyers comparing options right now.

6. Show up when people search "catering near me"

Someone searching for catering has already decided to buy it. The question is whether they find you. In your Google Business Profile, mention catering in the description, link straight to your catering page, add photos of catering setups and post updates before busy stretches such as holiday-party season. Do the same on any other map and review listings you keep up.

Ask for reviews the same way every time: one line in your post-order check-in that invites every catering customer to leave an honest review, whatever you think of how the order went. Google's contribution policy bars businesses from selectively soliciting positive reviews, offering incentives for reviews, or soliciting reviews that include specific content, so don't script what people write.

Effort: medium to set up, low after. Reaches: people who search before they call.

7. Answer every catering inquiry within the hour

A lead you answer late is a lead you paid for and gave away. In a 2011 Harvard Business Review study of online sales leads, firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited even an hour longer. That research wasn't about catering, but an office manager with a meeting on Thursday is exactly the kind of lead that goes cold.

• Route every catering call, email and form into one place.
• Give one person ownership during business hours, with a named backup.
• Send an after-hours auto-reply that says when a person will follow up.
• Track response time every week.

Slow replies are one of the leaks covered in why restaurants lose catering revenue.

Effort: medium, every day. Reaches: everyone who already raised a hand: the best leads on this list.

8. List on a catering marketplace, and track what you net

Catering marketplaces such as ezCater bring buyers who already order through them, and their reach is growing. MONKEY's data, reported by Food On Demand, shows marketplaces' share of catering orders rising from 12.8% in 2021 to a projected 36% in 2026, with marketplace orders averaging 6 to 8% less than orders placed directly with the restaurant.

The trade-off is margin. Marketplaces charge 15 to 30% commission on catering orders, so treat them as one source of new buyers, not the whole channel. Track what you net per order after commission, and follow the platform's terms when you give returning buyers a way to order from you directly. Our ezCater alternatives guide compares the options.

Effort: low. Reaches: buyers who already use that platform.

Leads from businesses that don't know you yet

9. Build a list of catering-fit businesses near you

This is the pool most restaurants leave alone, and offices do switch: ezCater's 2026 workplace research, released in May 2026, found that "96% of workplaces tried a new restaurant in 2025."

To build the list:

1. Draw your delivery area: how far you can deliver on time with food at the right temperature.
2. List the businesses inside it that feed people regularly: offices with standing team meetings, law and accounting firms, medical and dental practices, schools, real estate brokerages, car dealerships, co-working spaces, churches and sports clubs.
3. For each one, find the person who orders. That's usually an office manager, an executive assistant or someone on the HR or people team.
4. Record the company, address, rough headcount, contact name, role, email, phone and where you found them.

Google Maps, LinkedIn, building lobby directories and your chamber of commerce member directory will get you most of the way.

Effort: high upfront. Reaches: businesses that have never heard of you.

10. Run outreach by email, call and text

A list does nothing until you contact it. One email is easy to miss; a short series of personal, specific messages over two to three weeks gives a busy office manager several chances to reply. For example: an email, a call two days later, a text only if the person has agreed to texts, a second email, then a tasting offer. Our guide on how to get corporate catering clients lays out a day-by-day schedule and a sample email you can copy.

Know the rules first. The FTC's CAN-SPAM compliance guide says "the law makes no exception for business-to-business email," so every sales email needs an honest subject line, a clear disclosure that it's an ad, your postal address and a working opt-out that you honor within 10 business days. Autodialed calls and texts to cell phones need the person's prior consent under the TCPA, and the FCC requires prior express written consent for autodialed texts that advertise.

Outbound takes the most time of any method here. If you'd rather hand it off, Kutlerri.ai's Catering Sales Agent runs it as a managed service: it finds catering-fit businesses within 30 miles of your restaurant and runs outreach by email, calls and texts, with Kutlerri's own sales team behind it, and you approve every quote. Either way, outbound only pays if your kitchen can take more catering orders, so check capacity before you start.

Effort: high if you run it yourself, low if you hand it off. Reaches: office managers, executive assistants and HR teams.

11. Drop off a tasting box

Food sells food. Put together a small box for the person who orders, not the whole office: a few of your best catering items, labeled, with your catering menu, a card and a handwritten note that names one specific offer, such as free delivery on their first team lunch. Email or call ahead so the box lands with the right person, then follow up two days later and ask for a date.

Effort: high, since every box costs food, labor and a drive. Reaches: the front desk and the buyer, who are often the same person.

12. Partner with the people who already feed groups

Some people get asked "who should we use for food?" every week: event venues without a kitchen, event planners, property managers who run tenant events, co-working community managers, the chamber of commerce, school parent groups and youth sports leagues.

Offer each one something simple: a spot on their preferred-vendor list, a tasting for their staff, food at one of their events. Put any referral arrangement in writing. These leads come slowly, but one good partner can keep sending them.

Effort: medium. Reaches: groups you'd never find one by one.

How much effort does one lead deserve?

Work out what a won account is worth in sales before you decide how many tasting boxes and follow-up calls to spend on it. For a sense of order size, MONKEY's data put the average catering order at about $416 in 2025, according to Food On Demand.

Worked example: Say an office near you orders a team lunch twice a month at $400 an order, and your average takeout ticket is $40. Each catering order brings in the same sales as 10 takeout tickets in this example, and the account adds 24 orders and $9,600 of sales a year. Through a marketplace charging 15 to 30% commission, the same orders would cost you $1,440 to $2,880 a year in commission. These are sales, not profit: food, packaging, labor and delivery still come out of them.

A lead like that justifies a tasting box and several follow-ups; a one-off order for six people may not. To test what a target number of accounts would add, run your own numbers:

Whichever methods you pick, measure them the same way: leads, quotes, first orders and repeat orders from each method, every month. Drop what doesn't produce and do more of what does. For setting targets and tracking catering as a channel, go back to the restaurant catering revenue guide.