A catering order is worth ten to forty ordinary tickets, arrives with days of notice, is produced in a predictable window, and comes from a buyer who reorders on a schedule. Most independent pizza shops take catering orders when they happen and never market for them, which leaves the most profitable order type in the business entirely to chance.
| Segment | Occasion | How they buy | Lead time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Office lunch | Team meetings, all-hands, Fridays | Office manager or EA; repeat, scheduled | 2–5 days |
| Schools & sport | Team meals, events, staff days | Coach, teacher, parent volunteer; seasonal | 1–2 weeks |
| Construction & shift sites | Crew meals, site milestones | Foreman; high frequency, cash-driven | Same day to 2 days |
| Parties & family events | Birthdays, gatherings | Individual; low repeat, high volume spikes | 3–10 days |
| Community & church | Meetings, fundraisers, socials | Committee; loyal and word-of-mouth heavy | 1–3 weeks |
A first catering order is a lead. Treat it as a transaction and you get one order; treat it as the start of an account and you get twenty.
The post-order sequence should do three things: confirm it went well while the buyer still remembers, capture the occasion and the cycle, is this monthly, is it every Friday, is it once a term, and make reordering trivially easy with a saved order that can be repeated with one message.
Office buyers in particular reorder from whoever made it easy last time. Being easy is the whole competitive strategy.
The office manager who ordered once will order forty times if reordering takes less effort than choosing again.
Catering fails operationally more often than commercially. Forty pizzas at noon competes directly with the lunch rush, and a catering programme that damages regular service has cost more than it earned.
Define capacity explicitly (maximum pizzas per slot, required lead time, cut-off times) and build the marketing around those limits rather than discovering them during a bad Thursday. Catering delivered late is worse than catering declined.
Yes. Package pricing per head with clear inclusions is easier for a buyer to justify internally and easier for you to produce. Per-pizza consumer pricing makes a corporate buyer do arithmetic, and arithmetic is where they go to a competitor with a package.
Start with your own order history for large orders to commercial addresses: those accounts already exist. Then work business parks and coworking spaces directly. Sampling to reception is old-fashioned and still one of the most effective tactics in this segment.
Often more so, because a single standing weekly account can be a meaningful share of a small shop's volume at good margin. The constraint is capacity, not demand: start with one or two accounts you can genuinely serve well.
Keep reading
Running school and club fundraiser nights that actually fill a slow evening, build a customer file, and produce local advocacy rather than a donation.
Audience & dataTreating dayparts and occasions as separate audiences: the lunch rush, the family Friday, the late night, game day, and the office order.
ChannelsCapturing high-intent local pizza searches, defending your own brand name against marketplace bidding, and keeping cost per order honest.
Campaigns & offersThe seven automated journeys every pizza location should have running (welcome, second order, habit, drift, win-back, birthday and post-catering) and the order to build them in.
marketing.pizza runs all of it, every night, across every store you have.