By Kelly Grogan, Founder of CRUMBS, and Host of Restaurant Catering Crumbs
Most restaurants treat catering growth like a hiring problem. Find the right sales rep, and the numbers follow. But the brands actually winning in catering know something different: the rep is only as good as the system behind them.
Here’s a department-by-department look at what it really takes – and one action item each team can take this week.
Finance: The Foundation Everything Else Is Built On
Here’s something that doesn’t get talked about enough: if the menu is priced wrong, your sales rep is just really good at losing money at scale. Finance sets the foundation for everything in catering – and when it’s done right, it gives the entire operation something solid to grow from.
That means understanding the true cost of every catering order, not just the food cost, but labor, packaging, delivery, marketing and overhead. It means building a discount policy that gives the sales team room to negotiate without torching your margins on every deal. And it means setting growth goals that are ambitious but grounded in real data, paired with comp plans that reward the behaviors you actually want to see from your sales & operations teams.
Every time Finance sets a price, approves a discount, or builds a comp plan, they are making a catering sales decision.
What this looks like in practice:
- Menu pricing that accounts for all costs, not just food
- A documented discount policy or value menus with clear approval guidelines
- Growth goals tied to real market data and catering capacity
- Comp plans that reward the right behaviors, not just total revenue
This week: Pull your last 90 days of catering orders and review margin by order type. If you can’t tell which orders are actually profitable, that’s your starting point.
IT: The Infrastructure That Makes Catering Scalable
Catering is operationally complex in ways that dine-in service isn’t. There are more moving parts, longer lead times, higher-stakes deliveries, and significantly more data to manage. When the technology doesn’t support that complexity, even the best teams struggle to keep up – and guests feel it.
IT owns the systems that determine whether the catering guest journey is smooth or full of friction. That includes how guest data is captured and used, how orders flow through the team, how deliveries are tracked, and how your tech stack integrates with the platforms your sales team depends on. If your CRM doesn’t talk to your ordering system, or if you can’t run a report that separates catering revenue from your standard order data, that’s not just an IT problem – it’s a growth problem.
The best catering sales rep in the world cannot overcome a broken order system or a guest database that doesn’t connect to your CRM.
What this looks like in practice:
- Guest data capture that feeds directly into a real CRM
- Order management visibility across the whole team
- Delivery routing and driver communication tools
- Reporting that separates catering performance from standard orders
- Integrations between your ordering platform, CRM, and catering tools
This week: Take the time to place an order on your website, by calling the restaurant and using a competitor taking note of every step of the process.
Marketing: Keeping Catering Visible and Top of Mind
I a guest finishes a great meal at your restaurant today and walks out the door, do they know you do catering? If the answer is “maybe” or “I’m not sure,” that’s a Marketing gap – and it’s one of the easiest to close.
Marketing’s role in catering growth isn’t a one-time campaign. It’s a consistent drumbeat that keeps catering visible at every touchpoint. That means the in-restaurant experience, the packaging your food arrives in, the digital channels your corporate prospects are scrolling, and a proactive calendar built around real catering opportunity windows – corporate budget season, the holidays, graduations, back to school, and everything in between.
It also means arming the sales team with professional materials that make every conversation easier. A well-designed leave-behind or a polished digital menu can do a lot of selling before the rep even opens their mouth.
Every main mealtime guest is a potential catering customer. Marketing makes sure they know it before they leave.
What this looks like in practice:
- Sales materials and leave-behinds for every sales conversation
- Packaging that represents the brand and impresses at drop-off
- A catering marketing calendar tied to real seasonal opportunities
- In-restaurant visibility: QR codes, table tents, bag stuffers, receipts
- Digital content and advertising targeting decision-makers that speaks about catering without saying catering.
This week: Walk through your restaurant as if you’re a first-time guest and count how many times catering is mentioned before you walk out the door. If the answer is zero, start there.
Culinary: The Product That Earns the Second Order
You can have the best sales team, the sharpest marketing, and the most efficient tech stack in the business. But if the food doesn’t show up right, you won’t get a second order. Culinary is where the catering promise is either kept or broken.
In catering, the product has specific demands that differ from the in-restaurant experience. It has to travel well. It has to represent the brand without a chef plating it tableside. It has to be flexible enough to accommodate different budgets, group sizes, and event types. And it has to come with airtight allergen documentation, because that’s not just an operational detail – it’s a trust issue that directly affects whether a client comes back.
The catering menu is also one of the most underutilized sales tools in most restaurants. When it’s well-designed, craveable, and easy to order from, it does a significant portion of the selling on its own.
One great catering order can reach 20 or more new people. The food is the first impression for every single one of them.
What this looks like in practice:
- Menus engineered to hold well and look great after transport, not to mention profitable
- A catering menu that feels like a natural extension of the in-restaurant experience
- Flexibility for custom menus, dietary needs, and different event formats
- Thorough, clearly communicated allergen documentation
- Menu items designed with group appeal and consistent portioning in mind making it easy to understand what one needs to order
This week: Pick your three most popular catering menu items and do an honest transport test. Pack them the way you would for a real delivery, drive them around for 20 minutes, and see how they arrive. Don’t forget to take them out and plate them – does it really serve the amount you said or would you be hungry?
Training: Where the Catering Program Becomes a System
Great catering programs don’t live in one person’s head. They live in documentation, and they get stronger every time a new team member is onboarded properly. Training is what turns your catering program from a collection of institutional knowledge into a scalable, repeatable system that doesn’t fall apart when your best person takes a day off.
That means full documentation of every recipe, packaging standard, and execution process. It means role-specific training for every position that touches a catering order – not just the people taking the calls. It means equipping team members to naturally mention catering in a guest interaction without it feeling like a script. And it means building an ongoing training cadence that keeps catering top of mind all year, not just something covered at onboarding and forgotten by month two.
Every team member is a potential catering touchpoint. If they’re not trained to recognize and respond to an opportunity, you’re leaving crumbs on the table every single day.
What this looks like in practice:
- Complete program documentation: recipes, packaging, execution standards
- Role-specific training for kitchen, front of house, drivers, and managers
- Natural talking points so any team member can mention catering confidently
- An ongoing training cadence that keeps catering in the conversation year-round
- Regular quality checks to ensure training translates to consistent execution
This week: Ask three team members what they would say if a guest asked about catering right now. Their answers will tell you everything you need to know about where your training program stands.
Operations: Where Promises Are Kept or Broken
Everything else in this article is about setting the catering program up to succeed. Operations is where it actually does or doesn’t. Every single catering order is a high-stakes moment – an opportunity to earn a long-term client or lose one permanently.
The corporate contact who received the wrong food at their team lunch isn’t calling back. The event planner whose delivery arrived late is already looking for someone else. Operations owns the full order experience, from the moment a confirmation goes out to the follow-up after the food is delivered. And in catering, the details matter at every step.
The other thing Operations owns is culture. When the team treats every catering order with the same level of care and accountability as the in-restaurant experience, it creates a standard that’s hard to compete with. And when they maximize every touchpoint – a leave-behind, a QR code, a follow-up message – they turn a single order into the beginning of a real relationship.
A perfect catering order is your best marketing. A failed one is the hardest sales objection you’ll ever have to overcome.
What this looks like in practice:
- Clear ownership of the full order experience from confirmation through follow-up
- A non-negotiable standard for accuracy: right food, right time, right place
- A team culture where catering execution is treated as seriously as in-restaurant service
- Leave-behinds, QR codes, or follow-up messages built into every delivery
- Empowered managers who can resolve issues quickly when something goes wrong
This week:Pull your last 10 catering orders and grade them honestly on accuracy, timing, presentation, and follow-up. Where the grades drop is where you start.
Make Catering Part of Every Conversation
Catering doesn’t grow when it lives in a silo. It grows when it becomes part of how the whole organization thinks and operates.
That means bringing catering into your regular leadership meetings and department updates. It means celebrating catering wins across the whole team, not just with the sales rep. It means adding catering to your onboarding so that every new hire understands from day one that it’s part of what you do and part of what everyone is responsible for.
If catering is treated like a side hustle, it will perform like one. If it’s on the agenda, it stays top of mind – and top of mind is where growth starts.
Tip: Share weekly catering wins, order volume, or new client shoutouts in your team emails or internal channels. Small visibility creates big momentum.
So – Is Everyone at Your Company Selling Catering?
They don’t all have to be out knocking on doors. That’s what the sales rep is for.
But Finance needs to price for growth. IT needs to build the infrastructure that makes scale possible. Marketing needs to keep catering visible at every touchpoint. Culinary needs to deliver a product that earns the repeat order. Training needs to create the system that makes consistency possible. And Operations needs to execute so well that every client becomes a long-term partner.
That’s the flywheel. And when every department is spinning it together, catering doesn’t just grow – it compounds.
Catering sales grow when every person in the building sees themselves as part of the story. Not just the sales rep. Everyone.
You don’t have to fix everything at once. Pick one department, ask the question, and start the conversation. The restaurants making real progress in catering aren’t doing something magical – they’re just making sure catering is everyone’s responsibility, not just one person’s job.
If you need help making catering part of every conversation at your company, CRUMBS can help! 🍪💚
About the Author
Kelly Grogan is the Founder of CRUMBS and a hospitality executive known for driving revenue growth across B2B and B2C environments. With extensive experience building and scaling catering programs at both corporate and local levels, she has led cross-functional teams to deliver measurable growth through strategic alignment, operational discipline, and relationship-based sales strategies. Kelly is also Host of Restaurant Catering Crumbs, where she shares practical insights to help restaurant leaders build stronger, more sustainable catering programs.
