Need to feed a hungry crowd at the office? Chances are, ezCater comes to mind. You’ve likely heard of our outstanding 24/7 customer support (from live humans), browsed our network of 100,000+ restaurants available nationwide, and used our filters to find the perfect caterer for your occasion.

All those things make ezCater the leading food-for-work platform — and it’s why Fortune 500 companies like FedEx and P&G trust us to fuel their crews for success.

But beyond our filters, ezRewards and other easy-to-use features, the ezCater platform has even more food-ordering tricks up its sleeve. In this blog post, we’ll highlight five ways ezCater makes life even easier for professionals tasked with feeding the workplace. 

1. ezCater offers more than just occasional catering: we provide employee meal programs

ezCater research has found that when companies feed their workers, it can boost on-site attendance, increase productivity, and fight burnout. That’s why so many organizations host monthly pizza parties or order a full lunch spread to celebrate the holidays as a team.

Those occasional catered meals make a difference to employee morale and even retention, but recurring employee meal programs — like weekly catered lunches or bi-weekly grab-and-go meals — bring even more benefits.

With Relish by ezCater, feeding your teams regularly is simple. All you need to do is set a meal schedule and subsidy (or choose an unsubsidized option). Then, employees choose exactly what they want to eat from a curated list of popular local restaurants and rising hidden gems. 

For example, you could make Monday Meals a thing at work. Order catered breakfasts or lunches every Monday to start the week off on a high note. One week, employees might craft their own burritos, choosing lunch from a local restaurant on the Relish platform; while the next they might feast on their choice of savory lunch sandwiches from a different deli featured on Relish. Variety makes every week interesting.

Relish offers big perks for employers, too: they keep full control of food budgets without guessing what workers crave or balancing special dietary needs. What’s more, Relish is flexible and easily scales up or down to meet your office’s needs. Whether you’re expecting the whole team on-site for a crucial meeting or just a dozen employees on a slow day, Relish delivers one meal per person, avoiding food and money waste.

2. ezCater offers hands-off ordering

Concierge Ordering is our answer for busy professionals who don’t have the time (or patience) to build catering orders from scratch. Like Relish, Concierge Ordering takes the burden of curating a crowd-pleasing menu off your shoulders. But unlike the recurring employee meal program, it’s also ideal for one-off meals. All you need to do is provide a few details and we take care of the rest, a service that saves many of our customers hours of valuable time each week.

Say you’re planning a high-stakes client meeting. Offering food and drinks will make your audience feel happy, appreciated, and more receptive to your pitch. Now, the pressure is on to source a spread they’ll love. Not sure where to start, or what to pick? Let our corporate catering concierge do the work. Simply share key details like delivery time, dietary needs, and budget. They’ll do the rest, from choosing a highly rated caterer to selecting a variety of menu items to wow the crowd. You’ll receive an email when they’re done, so you can review the order, ask for changes, and approve it.

Concierge Ordering is also a life-saver when you’re dealing with tight deadlines, complex requests, and a limiting budget. For example, if you need to order lunch last-minute for a networking event for 200 attendants (including for guests with dietary restrictions), our food-ordering experts can help. Instead of spending hours searching for caterers who can fulfill the demanding request on such short notice, you can spend your valuable time on other tasks — like communicating with guests so they walk away from the event satisfied.

3. ezCater simplifies meal planning with drafts

Scheduling orders in the middle of a busy day? ezCater lets you save your work as a draft to return to later. That’s great news for professionals who get pulled in a million directions and need to multitask (sound familiar?) Now, you can start crafting your order whenever you get some free time and put it on hold when other responsibilities (like an urgent email) demand your attention.

Better yet, the drafts feature allows you to leave some details blank — like the date and time of the work event, how many people will be there, special dietary needs, per-person subsidy, and more. Don’t have that information? That’s okay. You can start your order now and fill out those details later. Your saved draft will be waiting for you, and making changes only takes a few clicks (instead of having to start all over again from scratch).

When the order is finally ready, head to check out. It’s that simple

4. ezCater lets you keep a list of your favorite restaurants

Knowing what to order isn’t always so simple. Everyone has different tastes, food allergies are surprisingly common, and employees have high expectations for their meals. Finding a caterer that ticks all the boxes requires some trial and error. So, when you do find the one, you don’t want to let it go.

With ezCater, you can keep your team’s favorites on file. No more racking your brain for the name of that eatery everyone raved about, or jotting down restaurant names on post-it notes and trying (but failing) to stay organized. Treating your team to meals from tried-and-true eateries you’re confident they will love is a breeze.

For example, let’s say the boxed lunches from a little-known deli across town were a massive hit with your marketing team. After seeing employees oohing and ahhing at the sandwiches and sides, you could save the deli as a favorite, so you can quickly and easily order from it again later.

5. ezCater makes it easy to order for multiple places

Catering doesn’t always involve only one location. For example, a food-ordering professional at a Boston-based pharmaceutical company may be tasked with feeding admin and research teams at regional offices across New England.

With ezCater, getting food delivered to different locations is no problem. And since you can save multiple addresses to a corporate account, you won’t have to type and retype the same addresses over and over again. This simple but lesser-known feature will save you a lot of time. Additionally, it can also keep you from making small (but significant) mistakes — like entering the wrong office number and later needing to solve the missing-meals problem from afar.

ezCater offers an easy and efficient experience  

Easy-to-use filters, top-tier customer support, and a robust national network of restaurants have solidified ezCater as the leading food-for-work platform, and we’re proud to help so many organizations bring memorable meals into the workplace. But we’re not resting on our laurels.

At ezCater, our team is constantly adding new features to create an even better food-ordering experience for our customers. From recurring employee meals with Relish to hands-off Concierge Ordering and beyond, we strive to make sourcing catered meals as simple and efficient as possible.

Ready to experience it for yourself? Connect with an ezCater specialist and learn how ezCater’s corporate solutions can make light work of ordering corporate catering.