The Catering Goldmine Most Restaurants Are Sitting On

I keep hearing the same story from operators.

A customer calls to book a catering order for 80 people. It comes in during the lunch rush. Nobody picks up. No voicemail gets checked. By the time anyone realizes the call was missed, the customer has already booked with someone else.

One missed call. A few hundred dollars gone. Now multiply that across every shift and every location, and you start to see the size of the leak.

The Math Most Operators Have Not Run

Here is the math most operators have not run on themselves.

If your restaurant gets even three catering inquiries a week, and you are converting one because the other two slip through, you are leaving two orders on the table every week. At ezCater's reported average order value of $420, that is roughly $44,000 a year walking out the door. Per location. Without ever telling a customer no.

For a 12-location operator, that is over half a million dollars a year in revenue you never knew you had. 

And it doesn’t stop there. Every one of those lost orders is also a lost introduction. Catering is one of the only channels where a single transaction puts your food in front of dozens of new potential regulars at once. 

The lost revenue compounds. The lost customers compound faster.

Why Catering Slips Through the Cracks

So why is catering still treated like an afterthought?

In most restaurants I talk to, catering is whoever picks up the phone. The inquiry lands in a voicemail box during the rush, in a general inbox, or in a web form that pings someone's personal email at 11pm on a Friday. 

• The lead doesn't have an owner. 

• The follow-up doesn't have a system. 

• The order sits behind 200 unread messages.

It's not because operators don't see the opportunity. They do. It's that every catering inquiry shows up at the worst possible time, and the people best equipped to answer it are already running food.

Catering needs someone who can give it focused attention, but the economics rarely justify hiring a dedicated person for it, especially for independent and smaller chains. So it ends up living in the gaps.

Something New We Have Been Building

This is the problem we have been working on for a while at Palona, and it is the reason we are introducing a new product to our AI suite: Catering Manager.

Catering Manager is the first agent we have built specifically for the catering channel. It is not a generic phone bot, it is a workflow built around the way catering actually moves through a restaurant, from the first inquiry to the final follow-up.

Here is how it works.

Every catering call gets answered the moment it comes in. The agent collects information: name, party size, date, requirements. The full request gets logged automatically, and the manager gets an instant SMS with the key details. 

When the manager is ready, they review the order, call the customer to confirm, and update the status. And when it is time to fire the order, the manager sends it straight from the Palona Board to their POS. That is it.

The point isn't to take humans out of catering. The point is to stop losing the inquiries that never got a callback.

What This Means for the Year Ahead

If 2026 is the year catering becomes a real growth lever for restaurants, the operators who win are going to be the ones who finally staff it like a channel, not a side hustle. 

That is what we are trying to make possible.

To learn more, book a 15-minute walkthrough at palona.ai/contact.