Catering ordering · restaurant groups
Marketplace fees are eating your lunch.
Fifteen to twenty-five percent of every catering order goes to a marketplace — including the orders from customers who already knew your name. Take those on your own checkout instead. Flat monthly, nothing off the ticket.
A marketplace at 16% takes this out of your catering every year:
$38,400
- CaterRail, flat$8,940
- Card processing, either way$7,104
- Back in the business$29,460 a year
Same order, two ways to take it
On a marketplace
- A marketplace lists you beside every competitor in town.
- They take a quarter of a catering order you would have won anyway.
- One set of rules for the whole brand, however busy a single kitchen is.
- The customer is theirs. You get an order number, not a relationship.
On CaterRail
- The order is placed on your own domain, under your own name.
- Flat monthly. Nothing comes off the ticket.
- Every location sets its own minimum, lead time and capacity.
- The customer, the card and the payout are all yours.
Your storefront, not a listing
Your name, your menu, your photography, on your own domain. The customer picks a location, builds a real package with real headcount rules, and pays — without ever seeing another restaurant.
Live screens from a demo storefront, walked through a real order. Type, colour and photography follow whatever brand is loaded.
Thu, Sep 10 · 11:30am
Fairview Center · delivery · 25 people
We text you when the kitchen accepts. Your card is held until then.
Every kitchen on one board
Kitchen full until 1:30pm. Orders already accepted still print.
- 11:30am4/4 · full
- 12:00pm4/4 · full
- 12:30pm2/4
- 1:00pm1/4
Head office sees every order across every location. Each kitchen keeps its own minimum, lead time and how many orders a window will hold, and a manager can pause their own shop without a phone call. The card is held until you accept, and the alert trail shows who was told and when.
The operator side, on the same fictional group. Every figure is demo data.
A catering channel you own outright
Your own storefront
Your menu, your photography, your domain. Four screens from landing to paid, with no account to create and no competitor shown beside you.
A board in every kitchen
Minimums, lead times, catering hours, delivery radius and how many orders a window will hold. A manager changes their own numbers without calling head office.
Held, then charged
The card is authorised at checkout and captured when the kitchen accepts. Nobody pays for an order a kitchen turns down.
Payouts you control
Money moves through your own Stripe account on your own schedule. A group that is legally more than one company gets separate payouts behind one brand.
What actually happens when an order lands
- 11:04Kitchen lineSMS
- 11:04Shift leadSMS
- 11:04catering@ inboxEmail
- 11:06Shift leadRetry
- 11:07Opened by shift lead—
Every send is logged, so a missed order is a question you can answer.
It reaches a person, and you can prove it
Every phone and inbox on that location’s list, then a retry, then a backup contact. The trail is kept against the order, so “nobody told us” stops being an argument.
- Sandwich Platter62 rounds3 orders
- Boxed Lunch25 boxes1 order
- Hot Entrée Tray2 half pans2 orders
- Garden Salad Bowl4 bowls3 orders
- Coffee Box3 boxes2 orders
Rolled up by window, printed at 6am. Nobody adds this up by hand.
The kitchen gets a number, not a stack of orders
Accepted orders roll up by window into what actually has to be made. Sixty-two rounds, two half pans, four bowls. Printed at six, before anyone starts adding tickets up by hand.
Autumn catering menu
34 items · 6 option groups
- Riversidelive
- Fairview Centerlive
- Northgatelive
- Westbrookqueued
Change a price once. Every shop that serves it updates.
One menu, however many shops
Prices, option groups and headcount rules live once and push to the locations that serve them. A location can still hold its own minimum and lead time.
Separate owners, separate banks, one storefront the customer sees.
Separate owners, separate money
A group that is legally more than one company keeps one storefront at the front and separate Stripe accounts at the back. Nothing commingles, and nobody reconciles it by hand at month end.
Peak lunch
Four catering orders can land in the same hour a kitchen is already buried.
One switch stops new orders at that location, and only that location, until the pass clears.
Nothing sits unseen
- RiversideTaking orders2 left
- Fairview CenterTaking orders1 left
- NorthgateTaking orders3 left
- WestbrookPaused · kitchen full0 left
A new order reaches every phone and inbox on that location’s list, keeps going until somebody opens it, then escalates to a backup. Every send is logged against the order, so a missed one is a question you can answer.
- 0:00Text and email to everyone on the list. Card authorised, not charged.
- 2:00Anyone who hasn’t opened it is sent again.
- 20:00Escalates to the backup contact for that location.
- AcceptCard captured. The customer gets their window.
Alert routing, retries and escalation are on the build schedule for the first pilot.
Operators keep the difference
$61,400
Kept in year one
Placeholder operator · four-location deli group
3×
Catering orders a week
Placeholder operator · two-location sandwich shop
9 min
Median time to accept
Placeholder operator · six-location group
“Example quote, not a customer: the first month we ran it beside the marketplace, then we stopped looking at the marketplace.”
Flat monthly. Nothing per order.
One location
Storefront, order queue, alerts, payouts.
$249
a month
Three or more
Each location runs its own board under one brand.
$149
per location, a month
Ten or more
Separate payouts per entity, onboarding, a shared menu library.
Let’s talk
Card processing goes to Stripe at their published rate, the same as today. No line here grows with the size of an order.
See it with your own menu in it.
Send one location’s catering menu. We’ll have a working storefront back to you inside a week.
One week
Menu in, storefront taking real orders.
No contract on the pilot
Run it beside what you use now and compare the month.
Your Stripe account
Payouts hit your bank on your schedule. We never hold your money.