Catering is an interesting topic in today's world given the pandemic. Prior to COVID-19, we started to see a serious rise in the number of restaurants that were offering catering to businesses. Afterwards, however, the catering industry took a big hit once office work and gatherings were limited. What we do know is that catering will come back and will once again be an important facet to the restaurant industry.

Catering provides a lot of benefits to your restaurant. In the day-to-day of a restaurant there is typically a lot of downtime. Maybe you're a restaurant brand that is only truly busy during dinner with a maybe semi-busy lunchtime. If that’s the case, then there is a window of time where people aren't coming to your restaurant or ordering food as frequently as at other times.

What can you do with that time? If you offer a catering business, that time can be spent preparing your next large catering orders. This allows you to optimize the time spent in your restaurant around those high-ticket, high-value, catering orders.

With catering, there is a lot of revenue that you can generate in only a few orders. Obviously there's a lot of things to think about regarding food preparation, packaging, and presentation, but it's still worth considering because catering can help you with your operational efficiency while simultaneously generating a lot of high-value orders increasing your top line revenues.

The added benefit here is when you're catering for a large group of people, you're also getting a lot of brand exposure. If those people have an enjoyable experience eating your catered food, maybe they’ll want to come back to your direct channel to order from your takeout menu the next time.

Because these two things work hand-in-hand, it’s critical to have a platform like Onosys that can help you power both sides of that business.