Never be satisfied with just a bite of success, and have your catering service join the roster of triumphant food service companies. Equipped with an online catering software, you can instantly access modern, sleek, and smarter ways to run your business. Here's our top 5 best software for caterers that would pave your way to a better food service venture.
What Is a Catering Program?
If you've only been starting and have no idea what a catering program is, let us fill you in. It's a software where you can deal with your catering business on one page. You can book events, schedule orders, plan corporate events, have a calendar ready to map out your team's roles, send menus, bills, invoices, etc.
What Are Food Service Systems?
Being in charge of your own catering business without technology is costly, tiring, unproductive, and, most of the time, prone to human errors. To neatly fold this up, foodservice systems take all the processes you need to start your company using an app, cloud-based site, or other methods. Foodservice systems make sure you can prioritize your quotes and customers simultaneously.
What Is the Best Software for Catering?
Are you kicking off your catering business from the ground or perhaps looking for a modernized way to touch up your operations? To help you out, we found the best you can find in the market and reviewed their features, weaknesses, and strengths.
#1 FoodStorm
FoodStorm is a catering software built for you to experience exponential business growth through intuitive technology. Compared to other catering business software, it can help you manage everything at once. It includes taking care of fresh food production and orders, multiple departments and locations, order placement, payment, and delivery.
Combined with a series of expertise, passion, and serviceability, global leaders in the catering and retail industries rely on FoodStorm. Among those are Compass, Sodexo, Albertsons, Roche Bros., and Fresh & Co. These corporate teams have the right solution to manage their entire catering business from one central online catering system where they can boost revenue, efficiency, and market share.
Features
CRM Features:
With FoodStorm, you are set to gain understanding about your customers through its real-time Customer Relationship Management data. Far from other CRM features you come across, this one is more than a contact database. It holds features where you can see all important information like sales history, impending catering orders, and major customer information when placing orders or quotes. This way, you can arm yourself with better marketing communication strategies to grow your catering business.
Online Ordering:
FoodStorm ensures you put your customers over everything, especially with its complete online ordering system. A customizable menu provides your customers extra choices and real-time tracking lets them know the progress of their orders. For quick food transport, enabling multi-location will help customers access the nearest store where they can order. In this system, you can also accept payments.
When it comes to payment, FoodStorm offers a separate lineup of features where your customers have various options to send their payments. At the same time, an invoice will also be sent to their emails for transparency.
Order Tracking:
To ensure that you manage all your orders and meet your quotes everyday, a centralized database tracks them. Joined by another set of features, you can also facilitate consistent communication with your customers regarding their orders.
Reporting:
Did you know that you can slice down your work hours when you accumulate all activities you've done in an automated report? Fortunately, FoodStorm has a solution for that. Thanks to its reporting features coupled with configurable setup, you can compose a report on your operations no matter your company size.
Integrating:
Improve your business process by connecting with other workspace apps. FoodStorm's integrations are extensive, so you can most likely work with everything you've used even before coming across this platform.
Self-servicing:
Got physical stores? No worries because FoodStorm's Kiosk has a way to let your customers place, edit, and pay for their orders on their own. All of these are then merged into your FoodStorm backend.
Out of all the online catering software, FoodStorm stands out with its comprehensive catering features specially designed for today's caterers. Overall, you can experience a best-in-class eCommerce platform with instant publishing, intuitive order management, powerful production reporting, leading software integrations (including POS), real-time catering data dashboard to glean insights about your operations, CRM features, delivery, fulfillment, and global, in-house support.
Feature Overview
World's only all-in-one catering management platform
Provides comprehensive features and capabilities
Manages all your order channels
Built to manage multiple departments and locations
Has a fully configurable online catering system with unique offerings and setup
Ensures maximum efficiency with reduced errors and growth in revenue
FoodStorm is indeed an unstoppable force to significantly raise your business from the ground. Be smart and be hungry for success with a catering software like no other. Click here to get a free demo.
#2 Connecteam
If you're on the lookout for the best all-in-one yet mobile catering software, Connecteam is the way to go. Trusted by thousands of catering services, it's got a lot of robust features to let you operate immediately with no fuss. Besides being easy to use with no expertise necessary, it's one of the few online catering systems with affordable pricing at such quality.
Connecteam is an online catering management system where you can schedule your staff together with their roles, customed for particular events. The roles include kitchen staff, sanitary positions, caterers, etc. But you can customize your own roles if you wish to. To make the catering events easier to manage, you can fill in relevant information into its catering system. You can also allow your staff to accept or reject event requests. All of it is available in its scheduling section.
When it comes to staff, Connecteam lets you onboard them at their own pace. Just provide how your operational process will go about, what policies to follow, how they can manage their routines, etc. If you're dealing with someone with a bit of expertise, you can develop an accessible knowledge base on your own. This is where all information about your work will reside so new employees can browse through them in case they need it.
One setback you may experience is the lack of automated report data. In this instance, you have to do it yourself based on catering events you handled using the software.
Key Features and Advantages
Staff scheduling with task delegation in each event
Allows staff to accept and reject events
There's an easy onboarding process for new employees
Creates knowledge base for self-paced training
Connects with your social media accounts for updates, announcements, and concerns
#3 Tripleseat
Seeking an online catering software designed for big-time restaurants? Tripleseat may be the one you're looking for. Besides being a software for caterers, it is also ideal for anyone in the hospitality industry. But unlike most solutions, Tripleseat is purely cloud-based. So, there is no need to install any extra app to manage your food business.
Additionally, what classifies it as one of the best catering management software is its feature that allows you to operate everything under one roof. Simply go to its website, make an account, and you're off to a good start. You can set up a communication route for your employees and guests for accepting events or for other concerns they might have.
In its cloud-based solution, you can document your event details and track their progress together with your staff. You can also take payments, send reminders and alerts, book another event in the future, and more. Plus, you can also respond to leads at the same time. The ideal thing about Tripleseat is everything's centralized. No matter what role they have, all your staff see the same information on the same page.
Key Features and Advantages
Cloud-based catering solution
Easy-to-use, intuitive interface
Centralized location for everything
Communicate with employees and customers
Take payments online
Send automatic reminders and alerts
#4 Better Cater
Just as the name promises, Better Cater is an online catering software where you can better handle your business endeavors from one single platform. Better Cater is different from other catering solutions where you can only focus on the operation itself. Instead, it also lets you oversee and manage proposals and other technical aspects of running a business.
Using its one-stop solution, you can track your business's performance. Track the costs of every material you bought in a specific event. Then, see how much you gained and construct a report with your branding. You can also manage events you handled in the past and will handle in future bookings.
As mentioned, this one is also a home for other business operations. Your employees can propose plans and, in return, have them discussed within the platform. Meanwhile, you're free to add a calendar, among its countless integrations, to have a systematic business functionality as well.
But it's worth noting that Better Cater is constantly improving, so there are not many features to expect. It's also not available on mobile devices. Still, it's a way to streamline catering team operations for all kinds of events.
Key Features and Advantages
Easy to use
Ideal for small to medium catering businesses
Offers an intuitive scheduling platform and CRM database
Integrations to bring your workspace in one solution
Applicable to oversee proposals
Lets you track your progress with reports
#5 Curate
If you're a start-up food business, you will most likely seek a comprehensive online catering system to cover everything you need as you jumpstart your way to success. With this, Curate might fit the role. With an exhaustive catering solution, you can instantly track the entirety of your expenditures, cut downtime and cost, prevent overbooking, and buying catering items.
Therefore, in a nutshell, Curate has all that it takes to streamline your business processes. With this online catering software, your staff can develop digital proposals. You can also take care of your overall sales. Most importantly, it's the only solution where you can organize your food. Curate lets you print recipe sheets, have an automated recipe generation, and have it added to your shopping lists. Doing so can help you track your expenses right as you plan them.
Unfortunately, there's no option where you can proactively communicate with each other or with your customers. Despite that, Curate is where you can organize your events, customers, bookings, reports, contracts, recipes, expenses, profits, proposals and contracts, and staff using one platform.
Key Features and Advantages
Offers digital forms and business proposals
Keeps an eye on your customers and staff in one glance
Estimates event expenditures using listed costs
Has a customer database and inventory tracking
Notifies you in case of overbooking issues
The Best Catering Management Software
Based on features and key advantages, FoodStorm deserves to be classified as the best catering software. As it highlights customer experience, there's no doubt that you can optimize your catering services in no time. Meanwhile, feel free to try out other online catering software to explore what your business needs. But take note of the deficiencies you might encounter along the way.
