How did Newk’s Eatery make catering about 11% of sales?

Newk’s Eatery is a fast-casual chain of sandwiches, soups, salads and pizzas. Its stores sit mostly in the Southeast. In January 2026, it counted 97 restaurants.

On a podcast summarized in April 2025, CEO Frank Paci said catering had grown for four years. It had reached about 11% of total sales, by the Savor.fm summary of the episode. He named the changes behind it.

• A shorter lead time. Newk’s cut the notice it needs from 24 hours to four. It is looking at two.
• Food that travels. Premium salads and wraps joined the catering menu.
• Unbundled trays. Buyers can take items on their own instead of a set package.
• Outside drivers for rush orders. Third-party delivery fills last-minute orders without pulling store staff.

Newk’s said catering rose about 1% in 2025. The levers work at one store. A franchisee with three shops can copy each of them.

Short-notice buyers are common. On ezCater, 28% of searches between June 2025 and May 2026 were for food needed within 24 hours. Fewer restaurants say yes to them. ezCater found that 74% of restaurants on its platform accept a 24-hour lead time. At 11 hours, only 50% do.

ezCater does not publish a share at four hours. It can be no higher than the share at 11 hours. So a four-hour promise puts a store in a smaller field. Paci said Newk’s may try two hours next.

Newk’s guarded its stores during the change. It handed last-minute catering deliveries to third-party drivers. Paci said that kept the rush orders from disrupting work inside the store.

The menu does the rest. ezCater’s lead-time advice is to build the short-notice menu from quick-prep items. Sandwich platters and family-style trays suit it. Slow-cooked meats and dishes wrapped one by one stay on the longer lead time. Start with one meal. ezCater suggests lunch when breakfast items take longer to make. Offer the short lead time only on trays your team can build fast. Keep everything else at a day’s notice.

Catering food rides in a car and then sits on a table. Greg LaFoe, a Newk’s franchisee in the Atlanta area, put it plainly in a sponsored 1851 Franchise article. “The food holds its quality over time,” he said. “That’s the number one thing.”

He pointed to sandwiches and salads. They can be made in bulk and do not need to be piping hot. Paci made the same case for wraps. He called them more portable and said they bolster the catering offer.

Run each item through the test in a real box, in a real car. Anything that fails stays on the dine-in menu.

A fixed package makes the buyer take what they may not need. Paci said Newk’s uncoupled its bundled items to give buyers more choice. Its catering menu now prices a sandwich tray alone and as a bundle with sides.

Two sides add $38 to the small tray and $73 to the large one. A buyer who already has chips can skip them. A buyer who wants everything can still take the bundle. Neither one has to call the store to ask. Price the tray first, then give each add-on its own price. The office catering guide shows how to turn those prices into a per-person quote.

Office buyers tend to come back. In the sponsored article from September 2026, LaFoe named medical and pharmaceutical sales teams as a large part of his catering demand. He also sells to car dealers and small local businesses.

That is a short list of steady buyers, not a crowd. MONKEY, a company that sells catering software, sees the same pattern across more than 100 restaurant brands. In its 2026 report, 60% of catering orders came from 5% of customers.

So one store does not need to win every office in town. It needs a steady group that orders every month. Keep a list of every buyer, with the date of their last order.

Newk’s runs catering on MONKEY’s software. The vendor’s case study quotes Liz Pearson, Newk’s director of company catering operations. Before the system, she said, the team hand-wrote make-sheets “every morning at 7 a.m.”

The software keeps a client file with order history, preferences and seasonal patterns. Pearson said the sales team relies on it. MONKEY sells this software, so read its growth claims as a vendor’s. The habit is the lesson, and it works in a spreadsheet.

A shared spreadsheet costs nothing. Fill it from every catering ticket for one month. Then call each buyer whose last order is more than five weeks old.

Paci called third-party platforms an efficient way to reach guests who do not know Newk’s yet. Apps bring new buyers. Your own channel keeps more of each order. MONKEY’s data shows the gap. Marketplace catering orders ran 6 to 8% lower in value than first-party orders. In-house delivery handled 53% of catering orders in 2026, up from 31% in 2021.

Use apps to be found. Then move each repeat buyer to your own ordering page. Put the link and phone number on every tray lid.

The menu change costs little. The habit of logging buyers and calling them back keeps the orders coming.

Catering touches the menu, prices and delivery, so ask your franchisor what the brand allows before you change anything. Some brands set one catering menu and one ordering platform for every store.

Size the goal before you start. The average catering order value in 2025 across MONKEY’s brands was $416. Four more of those a week at one store adds $1,664 a week. Over a year, that is about $86,500 in sales. The costs are small next to that. A courier fee is paid per drop, so it only costs money when an order comes in. The buyer sheet is free. The largest cost is a manager’s hour of calls each week. In the fall, add a holiday party menu to the same calls.

An office manager books a caterer she has already heard of. A short video from a food creator puts your trays in front of her before she needs one. CreatoRain, which publishes this analysis, runs that work for chain and franchise stores. You send the store addresses. Its in-house team picks creators from its food-creator network to visit each store. It pays them and keeps after them until the videos are live. The price is $300 a video, creator pay included.