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.

The biggest difference between a $250,000 catering program and a $5 million one isn't better food—it's better sales. Too many restaurants wait for the phone to ring instead of creating demand.

In this fast-paced session, you'll learn a practical framework for building a proactive catering sales strategy, from identifying your best prospects and creating a local outreach plan to empowering restaurant managers and measuring success.

Then attendees will break into small groups to build a 90-day sales plan for their own brands. Together, they'll identify target customers, brainstorm community partnerships, share what's working in their markets and leave with new ideas they can implement immediately.

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.

The right tech makes catering scalable; the wrong tech creates chaos. This session maps the essential stack for growth: ordering, CRM, delivery management, reporting, integrations, and operational workflows-plus what to buy now vs. later and how to avoid implementation traps.

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.