As the person who books catering for your team, you may have already booked several events this year — team lunches, client meetings, the occasional all-hands. Before you book the next event, mid-year is a natural point to reflect on your catering events as you start planning for the rest of the summer and into Fall. This post walks through four questions worth asking about your team's catering right now, while there's still time to make a change ahead of the busier back half of the year. You'll come away knowing whether your current setup is worth keeping as-is, or worth revisiting before Summer ends and Fall begins.
If the last few orders could be swapped with each other and nobody would notice, that's worth a look. When the same three or four options keep showing up, people quietly start skipping meals or ordering out instead. Ask your catering contact for a next-quarter preview instead of a repeat of what's already been ordered. A caterer with an active seasonal rotation, like Metro's current Summer Seasonal and Summer BBQ lineups, should have something new to show you before you have to ask twice. If their seasonal menus don't look substantially different, that's the clearest sign the menu has gone stale.
Watch what happens to the food at the end of lunch, not just what gets ordered. If entire trays of one dish go back untouched every time, or the same few people always end up building a plate from the sides, that's worth addressing before Q3's calendar picks up. A quick message to the team can help provide valuable feedback to take back to your caterer. It also tells you whether dietary needs were ever properly logged in the first place, or just guessed at when the account was set up.
Late deliveries, missing items, or last-minute substitutions are easy to forgive once. Twice in the same quarter is a pattern, not bad luck. If you've called your caterer more than once this year about something arriving wrong, write down when it happened and how it got resolved. That record makes the Q3 conversation, whether it's a renewal or a switch, a lot easier.
If your office's in-person days have changed since January (more people in on Tuesdays, fewer on Fridays, a new hybrid pattern), your standing order should have changed with it. In-person days also shift with the seasons: Summer schedules loosen as people travel, and Fall and Winter bring the team back in more consistently for the year-end push. An order sized for a schedule that no longer exists either wastes food or leaves people short, and neither shows up as a problem until someone mentions it. The same goes for headcount changes from new hires or a team that's simply grown since your first order went in. Call your caterer's account contact and walk through headcount by day before locking in Q3's calendar.
A fifteen-minute call with whoever handles your account answers all four of these, ideally before the first Q3 event gets booked. Metro's account team can review your last two quarters of orders, flag anything that's drifted from what your team needs now, and get August's calendar set before it fills in around you.
Author
Chris Zamfotis
Managing Partner, Metro Catering
Chris Zamfotis is the Managing Partner at Metro Catering, a New York City catering company serving corporate offices, private events, and businesses across Manhattan. With a focus on reliable service, thoughtful menu planning, and polished presentation, Chris helps lead Metro Catering’s approach to modern corporate catering, from daily office lunches to executive meetings, happy hours, and large-scale events.
Metro Catering has been NYC’s trusted corporate catering provider since 1981, offering fresh, high-quality meals for office lunches, corporate events, and workplace dining—delivered on time, every time.
