While things have changed during COVID, people are still ordering food for work situations. Whether it’s feeding warehouse delivery staff, hospitals feeding their essential workers, or sales professionals providing food for virtual meetings, catering is still happening. And with a little attention, you can optimize your online presence to capture it. 

The best way to get more orders? Listen to the customers! Optimizing to meet their needs will make you the partner of choice. Here are 8 ways to improve your online ordering presence to help capture your share of this season’s holiday catering opportunities.

8 Ways to Optimize for Holiday Demand 

1. Win your local sales rep community. Make sure your menu has options for 6-8 people.  COVID leads to fluctuating head counts & sales rep customers need to be able to accommodate both small and large group meetings. Don’t let your lead times, delivery fees, item minimums or menu offerings be a deal breaker! 
2. Box out competition! Boxed lunches are the top searched item on our marketplace. We’ve seen individually packaged items increase 5x in catering orders since March. Update your menu with these individually packaged fan favorites but don’t limit yourself by setting a high item minimum.
3. Keep your online posted operating hours current. Need to pause orders this holiday season? You can block off days in ezManage.
4. Add beverages to your catering menu. Adding beverages is a quick way to increase your average order volume. Beverages attach rates are up significantly during COVID, as offices look for all-inclusive solutions. Adding individual and bulk options is a win. 
5. Embrace online ordering. Holidays are a great time to incentivize your customers with special promotions through ezOrdering. ezManage now lets you create customer promotion codes redeemable through your ezOrdering link on your website. 
6. Support dietary restrictions. The top three used dietary filters on our marketplace are vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free. Be clear about how you design menu items to help holiday orderers meet these dietary needs!  
7. Add images to your online menu that show people your COVID-safe options. Our data shows that customers want to see photos of exactly what they’re ordering.  Check out our Step by Step Tutorial for Food Photography or contact our photos team: Photos@ezcater.com.
8. Eager to capture details for your holiday orders? Direct entry is the easy commission-free way to send payable quotes for your catering inquiries and process orders from your customer leads. 

Additional resources

We’ve got your back through the holiday season! Here are 4 resources ezCater offers to help our catering partners:

1. Use our Catering Partner Help Center for videos, insights and guide to get more ezCater orders. 
2. Power your 2021 strategy with data. Check out ezCater’s COVID-19 Impact on Catering insights for industry data, optimization recommendations & customer research insights.  
3. What’s the best way to capture holiday demand & drive large catering orders this time of year? Learn from your peers through Facebook Community & our Thought Leadership Resource Center. 
4. Our partner success team can always be reached at partnersuccess@ezcater.com.