Do you offer catering? We'd love to hear from you

[Hadley]

Hi everyone 👋 - 

I'm Hadley, a product manager on Square's Food & Beverage team. We're digging into how restaurants handle catering, and we want to learn from the people doing it every day.

If catering is part of your business, reply here with a quick intro about your restaurant and what catering ordering and workflows look like today.

We'd also love your take on two questions:

1. 😓 What parts of catering are the most manual or painful for you right now?
2. 💫 If Square could build one thing to make catering easier for you and your staff, what would it be?

No answer is too small - even a sentence or two helps. Thanks in advance for sharing!

[tranguyen]

Tagging in @lilisalazar @MAXSDELI @thelandofkush @elponce @indianathomas @ribshackcaters @Eddiemunster @TheArcticCircle @ArrostoDeli @Donnie-M @CinderBistro and @abrokenangel since I saw you shared some really great insights in this thread!

[Eddiemunster]

Hi @Hadley 
We do provide catering in our business.  We are a wood fired pizza business with 3 food trucks and a restaurant.  I'm actually in fact using AI at the moment to create a management system for our catering which is mainly on site food truck catering so I'm not sure if that is the type of thing you are looking at more catering for a party through the business with say a 20 pizza order etc. 
For us the most manual parts are responding to emails, creating invoices (which we are about to start creating in square) and organising the catering IE Food quantities, documentation for the team going out to the event etc. 
I'm not sure how this could be included in what you are considering or even if this is something you are thinking about. 
We have started trying to build our instore pickup catering business as well with catering boxes (Burgers, salads, wraps etc) however that hasn't really been a focus and hasn't been working.  If there is one thing that I would love to see with this part of the business (if we were actually getting salads for the items) would be not just a docket printing out when someone places an order but a breakdown of the items prep. 
I would love to help you so maybe if I understand what you are thinking about with square I could give more feedback.  Let me know what pain points you think their are and I'lll give it some thought. 
Regards,

Chris

[MAXSDELI]

 

We do offer catering in the way of trays, salads and dessert item trays. 

In as much as Square is concerned, two things spring to mind: a dedicated site page for online ordering of Catering (as the parameters for catering are slightly different than that of our regular online ordering page) such as timing, scheduling, service fees, etc. and the ability to edit catering orders after they’ve been saved as a Ticket.

In regards to editing Tickets, we’ve had the ability to edit the ticket header and notes section since day one however, in regards to editing or modifying the quantity of items after a ticket has been saved, the only way to currently do this is to delete items, enter the updated quantity and then save a new ticket. 

Example: we receive a call from a customer stating they’d like 6 sandwich trays for a date a week out, we then enter the request, save it as a ticket, print it and put it up on the calendar board. Two days later we receive a call from the customer stating that they’d now require 8 sandwich trays as they’re now expecting more people, instead of simply pulling up the ticket and simply changing the number of trays from 6 to 8 and saving/printing a new ticket, our only option is to delete the item entry and start over. In this particular scenario it’s not that difficult however, if we also have other items on an order (salads, prepared items, chips, desserts, etc) this compounds the issue making it necessary to scrap the entire order entry and start from scratch. 

The ability to edit saved catering ticket ITEMS/CATEGORIES, not just the header and notes, would be huge for us. 

[lilisalazar]

Right now, we use Jotform for catering orders because it gives us flexibility we haven’t been able to get directly through Square. Here’s an example of our setup: https://tierradelsolpdx.com/catering

What’s we found Square could not do:

1. Scheduling + availability. We’d love for catering orders to connect to a calendar so dates that are already booked can automatically be blocked. We currently use Jotform for another restaurant client specifically because of this.

2. Conditional logic. This is a big one. If someone selects tacos, for example, we want to then ask what type of salsa they want. Customers shouldn’t have to see questions that don’t apply to their order.

3. Catering-specific quantities. Things like napkins and utensils don’t really make sense as individual line items. It would be much easier to select the number of guests and have those quantities calculated accordingly. Min/max quantities for menu items are also really helpful.

4. Order dates on printed tickets. We can get our Jotform catering orders to print, which is great, but we haven’t found a good way to make the catering/event date prominent instead of the date the order was placed. Staff still has to double-check the actual fulfillment date.

5. Different payment workflows. Some catering customers pay online while others, especially organizations, need to pay by check. Our current form lets us accommodate both within the same ordering workflow. (not ideal, but it works for now)

If Square could build one thing?

A dedicated catering ordering page or link -

For larger catering orders (those doing weddings), being able to collect a deposit instead of requiring full payment would also be incredibly helpful.

Hope this helps!

[tulanejeff]

We do lots of catering. It can be as small as an online order for a dozen bagels and cream cheese (daily orders for us). Or larger platters for weddings, office lunches, breakfast meetings/events, birthdays, etc. Holidays like Thanksgiving, Christmas and Jewish holidays are huge for us.

Square Online menu | ezCater menu

About 50% of our catering volume is via Square Online. ezCater is a key partner for office catering via their courier network.

A direct integration with ezCater for order flow would be ideal.

We'd also love to be able to accept catering orders via phone or in-store and have them managed the same as online orders (with on demand delivery) in Order Manager. Currently, orders that can in via phone or email exist as open checks (or invoices) which is not ideal. We also use Invoices for larger custom orders like weddings, or for customers who are not comfortable with online self-service ordering. 

One feature we'd love would be to easy print, export or shared link to a 'hot sheet' of daily orders with Customer Name, pick up time, item details, special instructions, etc.

We currently use Order Manager but also manage manually a separate shared Apple Note w/ orders by date/time that we share between our BOH and FOH teams since we have a combination of order source/channels. ezCater and Square Invoice orders currently lack visibility at the POS via Order Manager for our staff to fulfill on.

Hope this helps. Happy to elaborate if you need additional insights.