America’s love affair with lunchtime burritos is no secret. Walk past any random cubicle at noon and chances are good you will find someone wolfing down a seven-layer something. Hot Head Burritos understands this and is revving up its catering and workplace food programs to accommodate.
Peter Wiley, director of marketing and IT at Hot Head Burritos
“About two weeks ago we turned on our relationship with DoorDash Drive for first-party large catering orders,” said Peter Wiley, director of marketing and IT, in an interview. “We’ve already seen a profitability lift.”
DoorDash is no stranger to Hot Head Burritos. “DoorDash has been 90 percent of our third-party delivery business for a couple years,” he said.
It helps that DoorDash integrates seamlessly with the brand’s Qu-powered platform.
“Everything runs through our point-of-sale with Qu, which integrates really well with DoorDash. It’s plug and play,” he said.
Wiley is seeing return-to-office momentum in its nearly 90 locations, which is benefiting the brand.
“In Dayton we have a company called Reynolds & Reynolds and it’s had everybody back for the last year and that’s helped our locations,” he said.
Wiley is a fan of DoorDash Drive’s financial model.
“It’s a fixed price,” he said. “The only time you pay more if it’s outside a defined radius but that’s not an issue with most of our stores.”
The brand has also formed a new relationship with Fooda, the workplace-dining platform.
“Fooda approached us and said it will connect us with businesses in Columbus and Windsor Locks on orders where companies want to bring in food for their teams,” he said. “It’s a little of a niche market for us but we see it as an opportunity to grow and expand.”
It also works with ezCater. By offering a comprehensive catering program for myriad types of orders it is finding its bottom line bolstered. “We’ve doubled our catering business over the last year,” he said.
And it’s converting that volume into profitability.
“Large catering orders are typically more favorable to our labor costs than orders through regular customer service,” he said. “They don’t necessarily take exponentially more work. We’re looking for more of those efficient orders. Our goal is to get catering up to about 20 percent of our revenues.”
