Sara Kear, chief marketing officer at Condado Tacos, dropped a bombshell during a panel discussion hosted by ezCater at the eighth-annual Food On Demand Conference.
Sara Kear, CMO at Condado Tacos
“This week we’re hitting a catering record,” she said about the casual taco and tequila concept with more than 50 locations. “We’re on pace to hit more than a half-million dollars in catering sales.”
Considering this is a brand that had nearly 12,000 catering orders in 2024, with an average order value of $600, this was juicy stuff. How did the brand achieve this?
“From a competitive standpoint, catering is less saturated,” she said. “In Columbus, where we are headquartered, we have seven locations and more than 50 competitors. But if you’re looking at off-premises to-go delivery, we have six.”
Advertising on Google convinced Kear this was a savvy point of emphasis.
“Our non-brand catering return on ad spend in Google Search was more than $14 non-brand, which means people were not typing in Condado as their search term,” she said. “That shows you how much more profitable catering is. It made it easy to make decisions around digital marketing.”
Once Condado realized the market was responding in this way, it decided to invest 20 percent of its paid media budget to catering. “We’re just now scaling that back as consumers are organically finding us, thanks in part to our website optimization,” she said.
Catering today represents about 12 percent of the brand’s overall sales, according to a recent LinkedIn post, and has become a major topic at the highest levels in the C-Suite. “We talk about catering as a priority at every executive and board meeting,” Kear says.
One of the things the brand has discussed is where to locate catering in the company’s flowchart. For year it existed under operations. But now it resides somewhere different.
“We recently moved catering to our marketing team,” she said. “This allows us to have more discussions about strategic growth and positioning, although the bond between operations and marketing hasn’t much changed.”
And neither has the brand’s philosophy toward catering.
“We view it as a marketing tool,” she said. “It’s a first impression of your brand. It’s important to get it right.”
