When designing a catering menu, your first instinct would naturally be to pick your top sellers. While that is important, a catering menu can get a lot more trickier than that. While your customers travel to your restaurant for your perfect creation, will that creation travel well and will it meet your standards of service?

Catering has become an increasingly significant part of the restaurant business. Where back in the day it was common for caterers to use traditional catering methods of bringing in food along with reusable cutlery, plates and utensils. Once the event concluded, they would then clean and pack everything up and take it all back.
Today it's increasingly popular for caterers to drop off ready cooked meals along with disposable cutlery, cups and dinnerware.

Considering Your Packaging

One of the most crucial aspects of differentiating between take out and dine is packaging. Choice of packaging plays a significant role in deciding what items to cater. It is important to understand that certain dishes fresh from the kitchen and straight to the dine-in table may look and taste a lot different when they have travelled and been in a box for a while.

So making the right decision and finding the balance between appearance and maintaining the quality of the food is important to present your food in the best possible way.

Creating your menu

If you already have an existing customer base and are looking to expand into the catering business. Taking a look at the performance of your current menu can give you important insight into what's going to be the most successful items for your catering business. Chances are that the best sellers of your dine-in menu are going to be the most popular choices for catering as well.

Those items are likely creating a brand for your business and some customers may exclusively use them with your business. Best case scenario would be to not stray too far from those items in the menu. However, it is important to consider execution. Certain menu items such as french fries, may not be the best catering option. Once they sit there for an hour, they might not be your best foot forward.

Customer Experiences

More times than others when customers look to place an order, they look for a convenient and easy ordering experience, this is especially common in B2B consumers. Your potential customers main priority might be orders that will meet their special dietary requirements of the people they are hosting. This is because in B2B catering decision makers are restricted to time constraints, such as lunch breaks.

For this reason they do not have a lot of time to survey and appreciate a long buffet table and figure out what they want to eat. So it's best to keep it simple and straightforward and most importantly keeping it tasty!

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