Over a decade of experience and thousands of data points analyzed, we've seen a pattern. Here are 3 corporate catering truths:
In San Francisco, New York, and Chicago, broker models can work. These models are mature enough and there are enough restaurants that know how to handle corporate volume, and enough redundancy when something goes wrong.
In every other market, this is not the case. There may be plenty of restaurants, but few are set up to deliver at scale, every day, without issues. For companies prioritizing parity and equity, your mid-markets are getting a raw deal under your global broker contract.
At lower volumes, you can piece together a program using restaurants. Once offices hit 200 eaters, the complexity requires strategic leadership, redundancy real data and on-site account management.
Brokers are built to source and place orders. That works when meals are occasional, but not when you are feeding people every day.
Daily service introduces repetition, volume, and expectation. Brokers aren’t set up to manage that level of control. They rely on a rotating set of restaurants, each with different capabilities, standards, and constraints.
There's a difference between placing orders and running a food program.
If you’re trying to create a consistent experience across offices, these truths are worth paying attention to.
A setup that works in one city at one size doesn’t automatically translate. Most of the issues we see come back to pushing a model past the point where it holds.