Agenda

All attendees, sponsors, and speakers must check in at the registration desk and pick up a name badge. Please wear your badge at all times during the Workshop.

Spend some time visiting with our sponsors where you can learn about products and services dedicated to improving your company's operations.

Every catering order sits on top of something invisible. The systems, the relationships, and the quiet decisions that determine whether that order ever comes back. Most operators only ever see the tip, and they build their whole program around it.

This keynote takes you under the water line to the ninety percent that actually drives growth. We go past the surface advice you have heard a hundred times and into the real mechanics of a program that compounds. Once you see what's below, you cannot unsee it, and you will never run catering the same way again.

Your job is on the line and catering sales have to double in the next 12 months. You don’t have unlimited time, unlimited money, or a bigger team. Where would you focus?

Michael Attias, founder of CaterZen and a former restaurant operator, kicks things off by sharing three proven strategies he would bet on to drive serious catering growth over the next 12 months—plus a bonus fourth strategy hiding right under most operators’ noses.

Then it’s your turn. In small-group breakouts, you’ll tackle the same question: If doubling catering sales were non-negotiable, what would you actually do? You’ll pressure-test ideas with other operators and identify the few moves most likely to make a meaningful difference in your business.

Walk away with a short list of practical, high-impact actions you can start putting to work Monday morning.

Meet fellow attendees, industry leaders, and sponsors over cocktails and hors d’oeuvres.

Catering is growing faster than any other dining segment, but the gap between brands that are winning and those that are stalling is widening fast. In this session, we will share high-level insights from the MONKEY's State of Catering report: what the data reveals about where trends are heading, and what it means for your program right now.

A panel of enterprise catering leaders will share how they're navigating the shift: where they're finding order volume, how they've built first-party programs that drive repeat business, and what they wish they had done sooner. Real data. Real operators. Real playbooks you can take back to your team.

You've built a catering program that works - so why has growth stalled? In this panel discussion, restaurant leaders who've pushed past common catering plateaus share what actually moved the needle: using customer data to drive repeat business, building a self-delivery strategy that protects your brand and margin, and turning one-time marketplace orders into loyal, direct customers. Walk away with practical, real-world steps to get unstuck and scale your catering revenue further.

Retention is where catering programs become unstoppable. This session covers how to use guest data and AI to drive repeat business without needing a massive team: segmentation, reorder triggers, automated follow-ups, personalization at scale, lead scoring, and the “minimum viable CRM” setup that turns data into revenue, not busywork.

This is the money session: How to grow catering revenue and keep it. We’ll break down a catering-specific P&L and expose the margin killers that quietly erase profit: pricing architecture, minimums, delivery/setup fees, labor assumptions, packaging costs, discounts, refunds/remakes, last-minute changes, and marketplace fee math. You’ll leave with a practical checklist and a set of guardrails you can implement immediately to protect contribution margin while scaling volume.

Delivery is where reputations are won or lost. This session focuses on building a repeatable execution system: delivery models (self/hybrid/3rd party), on-time standards, comms + tracking, setup expectations, proof-of-delivery, issue recovery, and packaging standards that protect food quality, presentation, and speed.

Catering growth lives and dies by the experience your guest has from first click to final bite. This session breaks down the moments that matter most - the ones that drive reviews, referrals, and repeat business - and how to standardize them across every order.

Join us for a parade honoring the winners of the "Top 30 Movers & Shakers: Catering."

Attendees will sit down with a few of the experts for a rapid-fire Q&A session on sales, marketing, operations and catering program growth.