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There is a scene I have watched play out in dozens of restaurants over the past several years, and it never stops being instructive.
An operator stands at the front of a half-empty dining room at 12:40 on a Tuesday, studying the floor the way a captain studies weather. Traffic is down. The marketing spend is up. The team is discussing whether the lunch special needs a refresh, whether the window signage is working, whether the third-party delivery mix is cannibalizing the counter.
And while this conversation is happening, a competitor's van drives past the window carrying forty lunches to an office park two miles away. One order. One invoice. No table turned, no server tipped, no aggregator commission paid, no discount applied. The margin on that single delivery will likely exceed the margin on every dine-in transaction the operator serves that day.
The operator never sees the van. That is the point; the most important competitive activity in the restaurant industry right now is largely invisible from inside the four walls, and it is reshaping unit economics for the brands disciplined enough to pursue it.
I have come to think of it as an iceberg. The dining room, the part of the business we design, photograph, review, and obsess over, is the visible tip. Beneath the waterline sits a channel that is growing faster than dine-in across nearly every segment, carries better economics, and is still treated by most operators as an afterthought run off the same line during the same rush by the same overstretched team.
That channel is catering. And the operators who treat it as a second business, rather than a side order, are quietly building the most defensible P&Ls in the industry.
The Inversion Nobody Planned For
To understand why catering is surging now, you have to start with a prediction that turned out to be exactly wrong.
When hybrid work settled in as a permanent feature of professional life, the consensus view was that workplace food was finished. Fewer bodies in offices, the logic went, meant fewer lunches, fewer meetings, fewer occasions. Downtown lunch trade would wither, which it did, and workplace catering would wither with it.
The opposite happened. Hybrid work did not shrink workplace food. It elevated it from a workplace amenity to a strategic business asset.
When a company asks employees to commute two or three days a week, those days must justify themselves. The office has to compete with the kitchen at home, and food became one of the few levers that works. Employers discovered that a catered lunch is simultaneously a retention tool, a culture signal, and an attendance driver, and it is dramatically cheaper than almost any other benefit that achieves those three things at once.
The data now bears this out at scale. According to ezCater's 2026 workplace research, 91 percent of workplaces plan to spend the same or more on food this year, up from 82 percent just two years earlier, and one in five plans to increase spending by more than 25 percent. Recurring daily and weekly meal programs, the holy grail of predictable demand, grew 26 percent year over year. Among hybrid employees, 79 percent say employer-provided food would make them more likely to stay with a company enforcing an in-office mandate.
Read those numbers again as an operator. Somewhere in your trade area, companies are actively looking for restaurants to feed their people on a standing, repeating, invoiced basis, and the majority of your competitors have no mechanism whatsoever for finding them.
The industry is beginning to notice. The National Restaurant Association reports that 38 percent of restaurants plan to add or expand catering in 2026, and the U.S. catering market is projected to grow from roughly $73 billion today toward $130 billion or more over the next decade. But planning to expand catering and being structurally built for it are very different things, and that gap is where the opportunity lives.
The Economics Beneath the Waterline
Why do I argue that catering is not merely incremental revenue, but structurally better revenue? Four reasons, each of which addresses a chronic weakness in the modern restaurant P&L.
First, predictability. The defining curse of restaurant economics is that demand is volatile while costs are fixed. You staff for the Friday you hope for and eat the Tuesday you get. Catering, particularly recurring workplace programs, inverts this. Orders arrive with lead time, often twenty-four hours or more. Recurring programs arrive with weeks of visibility. You purchase to a known number, prep to a known number, and staff to a known number. In an industry where a three-point swing in labor efficiency separates thriving from surviving, demand you can see in advance is worth more per dollar than demand that walks in the door.
Second, the absence of the aggregator tax. Operators have spent the past five+ years lamenting third-party delivery commissions of 15 to 30 percent, a toll that converts marginal dine-in-replacement orders into break-even transactions. Catering, by contrast, is a channel where direct relationships are still the norm. Even where marketplaces like ezCater play a role in discovery, the economics of a $600 order with built-in lead time bear no resemblance to the economics of a $23 dinner that must be at someone's door in thirty minutes. Jason's Deli, one of the most quietly effective catering operators in America, with roughly 63 percent of sales going out the door, self-delivers about 70 percent of its catering orders. The margin it keeps by owning that last mile is margin most operators donate to platforms without ever running the arithmetic.
Third, ticket architecture. A catering order concentrates revenue. Forty covers arrive as one transaction, one point of contact, one delivery, one payment. The labor cost of producing forty boxed lunches on a production line during off-peak hours is a fraction of the labor cost of serving forty guests across a service period, and it uses kitchen capacity during the hours when your fixed costs are otherwise sitting idle. Catering monetizes the 2:00-to-4:30 window that every restaurant pays for and almost none of them sell.
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Fourth, and this is the one almost nobody prices in, customer acquisition. The same ezCater research found that 96 percent of workplaces tried a new restaurant through catering in 2025, that 62 percent of employees who first encounter a restaurant at work go on to order from it in their personal lives, and 67 percent recommend it to family and friends. Consider what that means. Operators currently pay aggregators, search platforms, and social channels punishing sums to put their food in front of new customers one at a time. A single workplace catering order puts your food, at full margin, in front of forty potential regulars simultaneously, in a context where someone else paid for it and the sampling barrier is zero. Catering is not just a revenue channel. It is the cheapest guest-acquisition engine in hospitality, and it pays you to run it.
The Afterthought Problem
If the economics are this good, why hasn't every operator built the channel?
Because most restaurants attempt catering the way a sedan attempts towing: technically possible, structurally miserable. The order comes in for Thursday at 11:30, precisely when the line is bracing for the lunch rush. The same cooks, the same stations, and the same manager who is already short-staffed must now produce sixty portions alongside regular service. The food goes out in whatever packaging was in the storeroom. Something is forgotten, the serving utensils, the dressing, the one vegetarian meal that mattered enormously to the person who ordered it. The office manager, who ordered on behalf of forty colleagues and staked a small piece of professional credibility on the choice, quietly decides not to call again.
This is the pattern I see constantly in TNI’s consulting work: operators who conclude "catering doesn't work for us" when what they actually tested was "catering run as a stress test on a system designed for something else."
The failure is rarely culinary; it is architectural. Catering has different production rhythms, different packaging requirements, different failure modes, and, critically, a different customer. The dine-in guest buys an experience for themselves. The catering buyer purchases on behalf of others and carries reputational risk with every order. They do not want delight; they want certainty. On time, complete, labeled, easy to serve, easy to clean up, invoiced properly. The operator who delivers certainty gets something dine-in almost never produces anymore: a standing weekly order.
Chipotle's journey here is instructive. For a brand of its scale and operational sophistication, catering and group occasions still represent only around 3 percent of sales, a figure leadership has acknowledged should be double digits over time, and which it is now actively chasing. Meanwhile peers in the fast-casual space already run 5 to 10 percent catering mixes, and category leaders like Panera built catering into a business measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars with dedicated hubs, dedicated staffing, and a dedicated sales force. The lesson is not that Chipotle failed; it is that even elite operators cannot simply switch catering on. The brands that win the channel build for it deliberately, which should encourage every independent reading this, because deliberate design is available to anyone.
The Second Engine
I call the framework we use with clients The Second Engine: a parallel revenue system that shares your kitchen, your brand, and your food, but not your constraints. Building it requires discipline in five areas.
One: separated capacity. The catering engine cannot compete with the service engine for the same labor minutes at the same moments. Separation does not necessarily mean a separate kitchen, for most independents it means separated time (production in the 7:00–10:30 and 2:00–4:30 valleys), a designated packing zone that is not the expo station, and clear ownership. One person, even part-time, whose job is the catering order rather than the line. The moment catering has no owner, it has no future.
Two: packaging as brand. In the dining room, your brand is expressed through design, service, and plateware. In catering, the box is the restaurant. It arrives in a conference room and represents you to forty people who may never have heard your name. Most operators spend fortunes on interiors and then send their food into the world in anonymous foil and plastic. The catering winners treat packaging as a design brief: branded, labeled, structured for serving, engineered so the food arrives looking intentional. This is among the highest-ROI design investments in hospitality, and among the most neglected.
Three: a sales function, not a marketing function. Here is the mental shift that separates the serious from the hopeful: catering is a B2B business, and B2B businesses are built on outbound relationships, not inbound hope. The buyers are identifiable, office managers, executive assistants, HR leads, event planners within your delivery radius. They can be visited, sampled, and put on a list. A single afternoon spent delivering sample boxes to twenty offices will outperform a month of social media spend, because you are selling a recurring contract, not a single visit. No restaurant marketing plan I have ever reviewed allocates resources this way. Nearly every one should.
Four: logistics honesty. Delivery is where catering reputations die. Every operator must decide, honestly, whether to build the last mile or partner for it. The build case: control, margin, and a branded vehicle that doubles as a moving billboard. The partner case: no capital, no scheduling burden, instant capacity. The decision framework is straightforward. If catering is under roughly 5 percent of sales, partner, and treat marketplaces as paid discovery. Between 5 and 15 percent, hybrid: self-deliver the recurring accounts where relationships and margin concentrate, outsource the overflow. Above 15 percent, own it, at that volume the economics of your own delivery operation become decisive, as Jason's Deli demonstrates. What you must not do is drift, deciding by default with every order.
Five: a separate P&L. If catering revenue, labor, packaging, and delivery costs are blended into the restaurant's P&L, you are flying the second engine with no instruments. Operators are routinely astonished when we separate the numbers: catering contribution margins commonly run ten or more points ahead of dine-in once true costs are allocated to each. You cannot manage a business you cannot see, and most operators have never once seen their catering business standing on its own.
The Tip and the Iceberg
None of this diminishes the dining room. I have spent thirty + years arguing that the shared table is the most powerful asset in commerce, and I am not about to stop. The dining room remains the soul of the brand, the place where the experience is authored.
But soul and structure are different conversations. The structural reality of 2026 is that the guest has redistributed their occasions across channels, and the workplace has re-emerged as one of the most valuable of them, recurring, contracted, and largely uncontested. Every operator is fighting ferociously for the visible occasions: the date night, the family dinner, the walk-in lunch. Almost no one is fighting for the standing Tuesday order for forty, invoiced monthly, renewed annually.
The question I would put to any operator reading this is the one I put to clients: what percentage of your revenue requires a table? If the answer is more than 90 percent, your business model is possibly out of date. Your model is fully leveraged to foot traffic in an era when foot traffic is the most volatile variable in the model.
The iceberg is beneath your own waterline already. The kitchen is paid for, the brand is built, the off-peak hours are sitting empty on your schedule right now. The second engine does not require a second restaurant, only the discipline to design it, staff it, package it, sell it, and measure it as the distinct business it is.
The operators who understand this are not waiting for traffic to return. They are driving it, forty lunches at a time, right past the windows of everyone still watching the door.
About The Author Robert Ancill
Robert Ancill is a globally recognized restaurant consultant, design innovator, and trend forecaster. Based in Los Angeles and originally from Glasgow, Scotland, he founded The Next Idea Group in 2002, a hospitality concept and design agency that has led more than 800 restaurant and café launches across 24 countries. A respected authority on restaurant brand positioning, restaurant design, franchising, and emerging consumer trends, he also serves as Chairman of TNI Restaurant Consultants and as a board advisor to the AI-powered experience platform Atmosfy.
A leading futurologist in hospitality, Robert produces annual trend reports covering robotics, AI, plant-based innovation, and the evolution of casual dining. He is the developer of The Tolerance Scorecard and his 2025 trilogy of books includes Restaurant Marketing: The Ultimate Guide to Modern Restaurant Marketing, offering a comprehensive playbook for thriving in today’s tech-driven marketplace, along with The Ultimate Guide to Restaurant Design, a masterclass in building future-ready restaurants, spaces where every element works together to drive emotion, efficiency, and profitability.
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