Del Taco just announced it is leaning hard into catering and group orders as part of its turnaround plan, following the same playbook Chipotle and Denny's have used this year. When traffic slows, chase the high-ticket group order instead of waiting around for more walk-ins.
It is a smart move on paper. A catering order for an office lunch or a Saturday tailgate is worth ten to twenty individual checks on one ticket, with less line pressure and a guest who already decided to spend before they even called.
But here is the trap most operators fall into. They treat the catering order like a transaction instead of a relationship. The office manager who orders forty burritos for a Friday team lunch is not a one time sale. She is a recurring account waiting to be built, the same way a regular guest gets built one visit at a time.
Most restaurants blow this part. They fulfill the order, take the check, and never follow up. Three months later that same office is ordering from someone else down the street, and nobody at the restaurant even knows the relationship went cold, because nobody was watching for it.
Treat catering and community accounts with the same discipline you would use on a lapsing regular. Know who ordered, when, and how much they actually spent, a real number, not an estimate. If an account has not ordered in thirty days, that is not a dead lead. That is a guest slipping away, and someone should call this week, not next month.
Three things to do this week. Pull your last ninety days of catering and large party orders. Who ordered, what did they spend, when was the last time. Flag anyone who ordered once and never came back. That is your win back list, and a manager phone call beats an email blast every time: we loved having your team last time, want us to set that up again for next Friday. Build a simple habit for whoever answers the catering line or takes the online order, ask if they want to make it a standing weekly or monthly thing before they hang up. The ask costs nothing and it is what turns a one off into a routine.
The chains that win the catering trend will not be the ones with the biggest group menu. They will be the ones who treat the office down the street the same way they treat their best regular, tracked, followed up on, never allowed to go quiet. Del Taco, Chipotle, and Denny's are all chasing the same order size right now. The operator who actually works the relationship after the order lands is the one who keeps it, and the one who turns a single catering ticket into a standing account is the one whose turnaround actually holds.
This is exactly the gap Wingman's retention tracking is built to close, logging every catering and community touch, flagging accounts that have gone quiet before they are gone for good, and putting a real dollar figure on repeat business so it is never a guess.