Restaurant Catering: How to Create a Lucrative, New Profit Center for Your Business

Catering. It's a giant leap for restaurant-kind, that's for sure. Once you make the decision to do any form of special services, whether it's private parties or party platters, deliveries, carryout or even off-site foodservice, you don't go back. Getting there is half the battle, however, or more than half if you're going for real profit.

After a hard-hitting recession prompted many restaurants to re-examine their cash flow and profit margins, finding alternative revenue streams suddenly became not only a good idea for the future, but in many cases, a necessity.

For Michael Attias, president of RestaurantCateringSystems.com and a former partner of Corky's in Brentwood, Tennessee, the restaurant's catering targets reached $1 million-plus, effectively doubling his sales in just the first year of launching. But catering isn't just a quick-and-easy setup. It requires careful research, planning, equipment purchases, marketing strategy and other thoughtful decisions to make it work.

Jody Birnbaum, president of Caterconsult, Inc. and a former caterer for 20-plus years, knows the difficulty and logistical challenges catering can pose because of the need for added kitchen space and equipment, menu development, food purchasing, staff, training, prep work, marketing and more. In a sense, catering can become a whole minibusiness in itself.

"This recession clearly has been a game changer for the restaurant industry," she says. "Smart restaurateurs are looking for new revenue streams, and developing a catering program is a good option, but it definitely needs to be well-thought-out before people take that leap."