Editor’s Note: A version of this column was originally published on Franchise Times, a sibling publication of Food On Demand.
If you think you’ve heard a lot about catering recently, you have. It seems as though every restaurant-related company decided catering is the answer, again.
This might sound familiar to anyone in the restaurant space in 2019, when catering was the magic new revenue stream that would transform restaurants. And ever since people started returning to offices and getting together, the catering van has been gassed up and gaining speed.
Toast launched a catering and events platform in August 2023. Olo followed with Catering+ that October, when its operations chief called catering a key growth driver as workers returned to offices. ezCater rolled out an artificial intelligence recommendation engine in 2024, and even wired itself into Slack in February 2026 so all those lucky enough to be in a cubicle don’t even have to leave their meeting to order lunch.
DoorDash launched Meal Manager and tray-style catering that same month in San Francisco and New York.
That’s just the headliners. Underneath them is a genuinely crowded tongue twister of tech faves.
The reasons are the same as they were long ago before the pandemic: big tickets, good margins and efficient operations outside of peak hours.
Catering has been growing for 15 years and that trend is likely to continue. Technomic tracked the off-premises catering market from $37 billion in 2011 to $55.5 billion in 2016 to $64 billion in 2019, and by 2023 Checkmate put it around $72 billion. That’s roughly 11 percent of all foodservice revenue.
Olo says the average catering ticket runs about $350, against $35 for a normal lunch order. ezCater reports that 43 percent of organizations now run a recurring meal program, up 17 percent in a year. DoorDash says its team-sized orders grew 30 percent faster than regular ones.
Technomic found that restaurants with catering programs grew revenue 5.1 percent between 2023 and 2024, against 3.3 percent for restaurants and bars generally. And offices are fuller than they’ve been since the pandemic. Kastle’s occupancy index, one of the most widely used measures of worker office attendance, hit 62 percent in early July, its best showing since the start of 2020.
Way back then, 90 percent of operators said catering mattered to their business, while 28 percent admitted they hadn’t invested heavily in it, which is the kind of gap that makes a software salesperson’s eyes light up.
This time (Knock on all the wood with me, please.) there is no wall the industry is speeding toward. What’s genuinely different this time is the number of people in the van.
Customer ownership in play
In 2019, the catering technology market was basically ezCater plus a handful of specialist software companies, and ezCater was busy buying one of them. Today there are two dozen credible players attacking the same corporate lunch budget from five different directions: marketplaces, point-of-sale vendors, online ordering platforms, delivery networks and workplace-benefits companies who think of food as an HR line item. ezCater now lists more than 100,000 restaurants, up from 60,000 seven years ago, and Monkey notes that thousands of restaurants launched catering programs in the past year alone, drawn in by the high ticket sizes and the near-total absence of barriers to getting listed.
Which tells you what this fight is actually about, and it isn’t just demand.
Look at where the orders are going instead. Monkey Catering Platform’s 2026 State of Catering report data has marketplaces handling 12.8 percent of catering orders in 2021, rising every single year to a projected 36 percent in 2026. That’s roughly a 23 percent climb, nearly triple in five years.
In a market that’s growing anyway, nobody’s share has to move. This one moved a lot. Meanwhile the last mile is being quietly annexed. Pickup, which is free and requires no infrastructure whatsoever, fell from 66 percent of orders in 2021 to a projected 27 percent this year, while in-house delivery climbed from 31 to 53 percent and catering-specific delivery services went from 4 percent to 21.
The key thing this round is control. Restaurants and platforms are both spending gobs of money to be the one holding the customer relationship at the moment the food arrives, because the economics of who owns that relationship are brutal.
Monkey data shows 60 percent of catering orders come from 5 percent of customers. Whoever owns that top sliver owns the business and the average $400 order.
It’s the delivery wars again, in a smaller room, with much, much better margins. So it might be worth it for restaurant brands to get into the fray.
Repeatable corporate dollars
What’s actually different, structurally, from 2019? Two things worth watching. The first is that catering is shifting from events to recurring programs. That 43 percent of businesses that do routine catering orders like feeding their people every Tuesday rather than once a quarter for a client pitch. Recurring revenue behaves differently than occasion-driven revenue, and it’s stickier.
The second is that catering is being embedded into corporate procurement rather than discretionary spend. ezCater’s Concur integration is the tell, and its rebrand from a catering marketplace to what it now calls an enterprise-grade workplace food platform is the strategy stated out loud. A marketplace fights for transactions. A platform wired into an expense system fights for a permanent line in the budget.
Both are genuinely more durable than a 2019 order.
The operators who seem to be doing this well benefit from some good technology, but they’re really building or scaling sales organizations and operationalizing catering. Jason’s Deli, for instance, does more than 20 percent of its business in catering and turns around large orders in 90 minutes. Its sales VP has been blunt that third-party delivery has made everybody able to cater.
So alas, catering isn’t a feature you turn on. It’s a business-to-business sales motion with invoicing and account management and maybe a delivery fleet attached. It’s time to hop in the van, and get someone on the sales phone.
Nicholas Upton has reported on retail and restaurant technology for more than a decade. His Tech Stack column aims to distill complex ideas into actionable insights. Send interesting tech topics to [email protected].
