Catering Pricing Calculator: Price Corporate Orders

Price a corporate catering order by working up from food cost and service scope to a per-person number. Not down from a guess about what the client will probably accept.

The calculator below does that arithmetic. Enter your food cost per person, your target food cost percentage, your delivery cost, and your service level. It returns a suggested price per person, a total quote, the gross margin in dollars and percent, and a line-by-line breakdown of where the quote goes.

Catering Funnels is a done-for-you lead generation and automation platform built for restaurants with active catering operations. This page is the interactive companion to how to price corporate catering, which covers the framework itself: headcount tiers, recurring versus one-time structure, and the proposal language that holds a price when a buyer pushes back. That post explains the reasoning. This one runs your numbers.

Every value loaded in the calculator is a placeholder so the math has something to compute. None of them are benchmarks. Replace each one before you read the output.

How do you price a corporate catering order?

You build the price from four parts: food, delivery, labor, and the margin you intend to keep.

Start with the food cost for the specific menu and headcount you are actually quoting. Ingredients and packaging, per head, for this order. Not last quarter's average and not a number carried over from a similar event, because waste curves and batch efficiency move that figure between a 30-person order and a 150-person order.

Divide that food cost by your target food cost percentage. If food costs $8 per person and you want food to represent 30% of the food-driven price, the food side of the quote is roughly $26.67 per person. That division is the entire pricing mechanism. Everything after it is cost recovery.

Then add delivery, staffing, and disposables as their own lines rather than folding them into the per-person rate. Costs that disappear into a per-person number stop being visible, and invisible costs are the ones that quietly erode margin over a year of orders.

The calculator recovers those three lines at cost, which means the margin it reports comes entirely from the food multiple. If you mark up delivery or service, your real margin is higher than the figure on screen. That is deliberate. It is easier to add known margin to a conservative number than to discover a shortfall after the event.

What food cost percentage should catering target?

There is no percentage that applies across operations, and any single figure presented as the catering standard is describing someone else's kitchen.

Commonly cited ranges vary by cuisine, market, service model, and menu mix. A protein-heavy barbecue menu and a pasta or sandwich program do not carry the same food cost, and neither does a metro market with high delivery labor cost compared to a smaller one. Trade publications and competitor pricing pages quote figures drawn from operations with different rent, different labor, and different volume. Your own numbers govern.

The percentage that matters is the one your books support. Pull your actual catering food cost against actual catering revenue for the last several months and use that as the starting input. If the resulting price feels high, the useful question is whether your cost structure or your target is wrong, not whether the arithmetic is.

Catering food cost is also usually a different number from your dine-in food cost. Batch preparation, advance ordering, and the absence of table service change the equation in both directions. Running one percentage across both sides of the business is a common source of underpriced catering.

How does drop-off vs full service change the price?

Drop-off and full service are different products, and the difference is labor that exists on site.

A drop-off order carries food, packaging, and a delivery run. Once the food is in the room, your cost stops. Set the calculator to drop-off and staffing leaves the quote entirely, which is the correct treatment when no one from your team stays.

Full service adds on-site hours: setup, holding, replenishment, service, and breakdown. Toggle to full service and the calculator asks for total on-site hours across every staff member and the loaded hourly rate you actually pay. Total hours matters more than headcount. Three people for four hours and two people for six hours are the same twelve hours of cost.

The mistake is quoting full service at a drop-off price with a modest bump added for the trouble. Run both versions in the calculator with the same guest count and the gap between them is the number you should be presenting to the client as the cost of on-site service. That gap is not a surcharge. It is a different scope of work.

How do you quote a recurring office account?

Quote a recurring account as a schedule, not as a series of separate events.

The second panel of the calculator projects the annual value of the account from your own inputs. Enter how often the client would reorder at that size and it returns monthly and twelve-month revenue at your computed quote. The twelve-month figure is a projection based on the numbers you entered, not a forecast and not a result. It assumes the order size, your costs, and the reorder frequency all hold for a year.

That projection is useful for one decision: what a standing schedule is worth compared to a one-time booking. An account that reorders twice a month at a modest quote outperforms a larger single event, and it costs less to serve because there is no re-quoting and no new client onboarding on each order. The corporate catering flywheel covers what a direct account produces beyond the reorders themselves, including referrals from attendees and dine-in traffic.

The structural side of a standing arrangement, including billing cycle, advance notice windows, and menu rotation, is in the recurring office lunch account guide. Price the schedule once, present it as a program, and stop re-quoting the same client every month.

What this calculator leaves out

Commission. Every figure here assumes the order is booked direct and you keep the full quote.

If the order comes through a marketplace, subtract the platform's cut from the margin line before you decide whether the price works. The ezCater commission calculator is the sibling tool for that math, and it shows what commonly reported commission rates cost across a year of volume.

Getting corporate clients to quote in the first place is a separate problem from pricing them. That is what the Delivery plan is built for. On Delivery and Full-Service plans: we run the campaign until you have earned back at least what you paid.

Common questions

What per-person price should I charge for corporate catering? There is no universal figure. The correct price is a function of your actual food cost per person for the specific menu, the delivery and labor cost for that event, and the food cost percentage your books support. Start from your own cost structure. Any guide naming a specific per-person rate is describing a different operation's economics, with different rent, labor, and volume.

Does this calculator save my numbers? No. Nothing is stored, sent, or remembered. Every value lives in the page while you have it open and disappears when you close it. Reload the page and the placeholder examples return. If you want to keep a quote, copy the breakdown into your own proposal or spreadsheet before you leave.

Why does the calculator show a lower margin than I expected? Because delivery, staffing, and disposables are recovered at cost, so all reported margin comes from the food multiple alone. Most operators mark up delivery and service as well, which means their real margin sits above the figure on screen. The calculator is deliberately conservative. Adding known margin to a safe number is easier than finding a shortfall after the event.

Should I quote a direct client the same price I quote through a marketplace? Marketplace pricing usually carries an implicit assumption that a percentage leaves in commission. Quoting a direct client at that same rate absorbs the commission as reduced profit instead of recovering it as margin. The direct rate should reflect the full margin available when no platform takes a cut. The framework for that conversation is in how to price corporate catering.