Written by
Nomni
The ultimate hospo solution
Catering is the biggest order most guests will ever place with you. Industry benchmarks put the average catering order at roughly ten times the size of a typical individual order. It's the single highest-value transaction in hospitality, by a wide margin.
And yet, for most venues, that order still runs on a spreadsheet, a phone call, or a bolted-on tool that has nothing to do with the platform guests use every other day. That gap is the opportunity. On Nomni One, catering is not a separate product sitting off to the side. It is another channel into the same platform that already runs your ordering, POS, kitchen, loyalty and marketing, which means your largest order can also be your best chance to win a repeat guest.
Why catering breaks when it lives outside your platform
When catering sits outside your core system, you inherit the same broken economics as everything else that gets bolted on: another vendor, another integration, another data silo. The order gets fulfilled, but the value leaks away.
Three things go missing. First, there is no clean link to the kitchen, so large advance orders rely on manual entry and are easy to miss during prep. Second, there is no link to loyalty or your CRM, so the person who just placed a $400 order looks like a total stranger the next time they buy a coffee. Third, there is no data, so you cannot see who is ordering, how often, or what would bring them back. It is the same relationship and revenue leakage operators already know from third-party delivery marketplaces, just applied to their highest-value transaction.
Catering is a channel, not a category
The fix is to stop treating catering as a category and start treating it as a channel. On Nomni, catering runs natively across your POS and online ordering, on the same menu, the same kitchen routing and the same guest record as counter, table, kiosk and delivery orders.
Because it is native, a catering order behaves like every other order in the system. Staff can enter it straight into the POS alongside dine-in, schedule it with a date and time, and let prep lead times move it from scheduled to active automatically. It flows into your Kitchen Display System, supports corporate credit accounts and pay-later billing, and accepts Nomni Rewards at checkout. Nothing vanishes into a spreadsheet, and nothing has to be re-keyed.
How one catering order becomes a repeat guest
Here is the part that turns catering from a fulfilment task into a growth lever: the order is the entry point, not the endpoint. A catering order is usually placed by someone who is not yet a regular, an office manager, an event planner, a host. Loyalty is what turns that one-time buyer into a known, trackable guest.
The behaviour is well documented. According to ezCater, 70% of people who first tried a restaurant through a work catering order later placed a personal order, and 75% recommended it to someone else. The demand to convert those people is already there. What most operators lack is the connection to act on it.
On Nomni, that connection is built in. A catering order earns the same loyalty currency as any other visit, so the person who placed it walks away holding Nomni Rewards, your own branded currency, redeemable only at your venue. A large order generates a meaningful reward balance, which gives that individual a concrete reason to come back on their own. Because the order is captured against a guest profile, it also feeds the same CRM that powers your marketing automation, so the person who ordered lunch for thirty gets the next email, SMS or offer that brings them back solo. Loyalty data is collected once and used everywhere. It is the platform logic in action: every part of Nomni makes the next part stronger, and catering is a high-value input into that loop rather than a side road around it.
What catering plus loyalty looks like over time
The compounding effect is easy to see with a simple, illustrative example. Say a venue takes ten catering orders a week at an average of a few hundred dollars each. That is already a strong incremental revenue line on its own. Now add loyalty. If even a modest share of those orderers redeem their Nomni Rewards and return as individuals, every single event starts generating a stream of smaller repeat visits from a customer you would otherwise never have identified.
The numbers above are directional, not a promise, and real results depend on your reward settings and follow-up. The point is structural: without loyalty, a catering order is one transaction. With it, one order becomes the first of many.
Take back control of your biggest orders
Hospitality has spent years letting its highest-value transactions get siloed, outsourced or ignored, and catering is the clearest example. It deserves better than a spreadsheet and a forget-about-it workflow.
On Nomni One, catering is a channel that feeds your loyalty engine, your CRM and your kitchen, exactly like every other order. One platform, endless channels, and every order, catering included, working to bring guests back.
Your biggest order shouldn't be your last. See how Nomni Catering and Loyalty work together, or book a walkthrough.
Further reading
Enhancements for Seamless Catering Order Management: How Catering Works Day to day inside your POS
Nomni Marketing and CRM: The engine that turns one order into repeat visits
The Loyalty Blindspot, on the guests your systems cannot see
