Pricing › Catering Bookings Add-On — the page a restaurant owner lands on when they tap “Add catering” on the price sheet.
Your food already feeds a dining room. Let's get it booked for the office party too.
Most restaurants that cater are invisible to the people who book catering — office managers, admins, and event planners searching and scrolling right now for November and December parties. This add-on builds the page, the inquiry form, and the ads that put you in front of them — and tracks every inquiry so you can see exactly what it earns.
What it costs — the whole price, up front
For comparison, everything else on our price sheet: website setup $300 once, care plan $99/mo. This add-on sits on top of the care plan — you need the website and the plan first.
One catering booking is worth 40–80 regular plates. That's why catering is the one kind of restaurant advertising where the math can actually work — see the break-even below.
What we actually do
Two parts: we build the booking system on your website (the $249 setup), then we drive buyers to it every month (the $349 Traffic Engine). Here's each piece, plainly.
A real catering page on your website
Not a PDF menu buried in a footer. A page built to be found by Google and trusted by an office manager in 30 seconds: your packages, what each one includes, serving sizes, prices or starting prices, lead time, and delivery area — with real photos of your food.
- Packages & per-person pricing laid out cleanly
- Your real catering photos
- Minimums, lead time & delivery radius stated up front
An inquiry form that filters, not just collects
Every inquiry asks the three questions that separate a real booking from a tire-kicker — event date, headcount, and budget — plus contact info and delivery address. It lands in your inbox the second it's sent, so you can call back while they're still deciding.
- Date / headcount / budget required fields
- Instant email alert on every inquiry
- No phone-tag with people who were never serious
Catering on your Google profile
When someone searches “catering near me,” your Google Business Profile is what they see first. We add catering to your listed services and link it straight to your catering page with a tracked link, so Google inquiries show up in your numbers too.
- Catering services added to your GBP
- Tracked link to your catering page
- Shows in your monthly report alongside ad inquiries
A QR kit for the customers you already have
Your regulars already love your food — some of them run offices. We make counter cards and receipt/box stickers with a QR code to your catering page, so the next time a regular is put in charge of the office lunch, you're the obvious call.
- Counter card + sticker designs, print-ready
- QR goes straight to the inquiry form
- Scans tracked in your dashboard
A catering counter on your owner dashboard
The same dashboard that shows your order taps gets a catering section: inquiries this month, where each one came from (ad, Google, QR, direct), and which ones you booked. If it isn't producing, you'll see that too — in plain numbers, not a sales pitch.
- Inquiries by source, updated with your report
- Booked vs. not-booked tracking
- The honest basis for keep-or-pause decisions
The Traffic Engine — $349/mo, month-to-month
A catering page nobody visits books nothing. The engine puts it in front of the people in your delivery area whose job includes feeding a group:
- Meta ads (Facebook + Instagram) aimed at office managers, admin assistants, HR staff, and event planners within your delivery radius
- English and Spanish creative — both audiences book catering in the Tri-Cities
- Retargeting: anyone who viewed your catering page but didn't inquire sees your ad again for 30 days — party planners comparison-shop before they commit
- ~$300/mo ad budget on your own card, paid direct to Meta. We manage it; we never hold or mark up your spend
- A monthly one-page report: spend, page visits, inquiries, cost per inquiry, and what booked — the same tracked style as your website report
How you break even
Catering works where plate ads don't, because the ticket is 40–80× bigger. You don't need a flood of orders. You need about one good booking a month.
The break-even, step by step
Ad spend (your card) ~$300
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All-in per month $649
Catering keeps ≈ 65¢ of every $1
after food cost (typical ~35% food cost)
$649 ÷ 0.65 = $998 ≈ $1,000 in sales
So the month pays for itself at roughly $1,000 in catering sales. That's not a hope — it's arithmetic. Whether the ads deliver that $1,000 is the real question, and the holiday math further down shows the working, assumptions included.
Run your own numbers
Drag the sliders to what a booking looks like at your restaurant. Gross profit uses the same 65% assumption as the break-even above.
This calculator does arithmetic, not promises. It doesn't include your labor or delivery time, and it can't know how many bookings your market will send you — the example scenarios below show how we'd estimate that, with every assumption printed.
Why the timing matters: holiday season is catering season
From late November through December, businesses feed people constantly — staff parties, client thank-yous, crew lunches, end-of-year meetings. In the Tri-Cities, that's offices, medical groups, schools, churches, dealerships, warehouses, and contractors treating their crews.
The catch: almost none of it is booked in December. The admin planning a Dec 12 party picks the food in late October and November. A restaurant that launches its catering push in December has already missed the season. Launching now is the whole point.
How many catering sales could this produce?
Nobody honest can promise you a number of bookings. What we can do is show the estimate the way we'd want it shown to us — every assumption on the table, so you can judge whether it's believable for your restaurant.
- Ad budget $300/mo buying local clicks at roughly $0.80–$1.50 each → about 200–375 visits to your catering page
- 3–5% of visits become an inquiry (a catering page with real prices and a short form — for comparison, a good restaurant page turns 1–2 of every 100 visits into an order tap)
- About 1 in 3 inquiries books — catering inquiries are high-intent: they arrive with a date and a headcount already in hand
- Plus inquiries the ads don't pay for: Google profile, QR scans from your regulars, and repeat bookers
(on your card)
from the ads
headcount & budget
holiday-season month
| Example month | Bookings | Avg. booking | Revenue | Gross profit (65%) | After $649 cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Slow start — ads still learning, mostly Google + QR inquiries | 2 | $550 | $1,100 | $715 | +$66 |
| Steady holiday month — funnel working as assumed | 4 | $700 | $2,800 | $1,820 | +$1,171 |
| Strong December — big parties plus last-minute crew lunches | 6 | $850 | $5,100 | $3,315 | +$2,666 |
Slow start
Steady holiday month
Strong December
Read the slow-start row carefully — that's the honest floor of this estimate, and it still roughly carries itself, because one booking is worth so much. The risk is real, though: a restaurant that can't staff a 40-person order, or whose average booking is $250, does different math. That's why the calculator above uses your numbers, and why we gate this add-on (next section).
Who this is for — and who it isn't
We only sell this where it can work. If it can't, we'd rather tell you now than report bad numbers to you in December.
A good fit if…
- You already cater, or your menu travels well in trays (most Mexican, BBQ, deli, and family-style menus do)
- You can staff an order for 20–100 people without wrecking your dining room
- Your average catering ticket is $400 or more
- You're on the care plan with at least 30 days of website data, so we know your baseline before spending on ads
Not yet if…
- A big order would overwhelm your kitchen — fix capacity first, advertise second
- Your catering would average under ~$300 a booking — the break-even stops working
- You want a guaranteed number of bookings — nobody can sell you that honestly, including us
- You're not on a care plan — the engine only runs for care-plan clients
How it starts
We build it
You send us your catering menu, packages, and photos. We build the page, the form, the Google update, and the QR kit.
You approve it
You check prices, minimums, and lead times. Nothing goes live — and no ad dollar is spent — until you say it's right.
Ads go live
English + Spanish campaigns launch to office and event audiences in your delivery area. Retargeting switches on.
You see the report
Spend, visits, inquiries, cost per inquiry, bookings. Keep it, adjust it, or pause it — it's month-to-month.
Straight answers
Do you guarantee a number of catering bookings?
No — and be careful with anyone who does. We guarantee the system: the page, the form, the ads running to the right audience, and a tracked monthly report showing exactly what came in. The example numbers on this page are labeled example math with the assumptions printed, because that's the honest way to sell it.
Who pays for the ads?
You do — about $300/month, charged by Meta directly to your card on your own ad account. We manage the campaigns as part of the $349 engine fee. We never hold your ad money or add a percentage on top of it.
What if December ends and I want to stop?
Pause it. The Traffic Engine is month-to-month with no contract. Your catering page, form, and QR kit stay on your website either way — you paid for the setup once, and it's yours. Many restaurants will keep it running: January brings corporate lunch budgets back, and every holiday booker is a repeat customer next year.
I don't cater yet. Can I start with this?
Start with the setup only if your menu and kitchen can genuinely handle tray orders — we'll talk it through honestly before you pay anything. If a 50-person order would sink a Friday night, the right first step is building the catering operation, not advertising it.
Why only for care-plan clients?
Because the engine needs the foundation: your website, your dashboard, and at least 30 days of your own traffic data so we can tell the difference between what the ads produced and what was already happening. It also keeps our workload sane — one system, run well, for clients we're already reporting to.
December parties are being booked now.
Every week of October that passes is a week of holiday bookings going to whichever restaurant the office manager found first. If you cater — or you can — let's get your page live while the booking window is open.
Not a Nova Pulse client yet? This add-on rides on your website — start with a free website concept.