Office catering orders: ezCater, Google Ads or direct

Wedding season is in full swing, and for many caterers June is also when the office side looks thin. Summer schedules, vacations and half-empty floors cut the weekday lunch orders. It is a good month to decide where next fall’s office orders should come from, because the decision is about cost, and there are now fresh numbers to make it with.

There are three places an office order can start: a marketplace such as ezCater, a Google search that lands on your site, or an office that already knows you and orders direct. They cost very different amounts, and most caterers need all three. The question is the order you invest in them.

What the marketplace brings

ezCater’s pitch to caterers is reach. Its marketplace page says buyers there “place big catering orders: $420+ on average” and that it takes orders from over 90% of Fortune 500 companies. Those are ezCater’s own figures, and nobody else publishes a comparable number for office catering, so treat them as the marketplace describing itself.

The demand behind it is real. ezCater data reported by QSR in May found 91% of workplaces plan to spend the same or more on food in 2026, up from 82% in 2024, and that daily or weekly meal programs had grown 26% year over year. The same release found 96% of workplaces tried a new restaurant in 2025. Offices are open to new caterers, and many of them find those caterers on a marketplace.

What ezCater does not publish is what it charges. Its commission terms sit behind the partner portal rather than on a public page, so get them in writing before you compare channels. Without that number, nobody can tell you whether a marketplace order costs more or less than a search order.

The other cost is ownership. The buyer’s order history and messages live inside the marketplace. That is fine for a first order. It is expensive for the tenth.

What a Google search order costs

WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2026 Google Ads benchmarks, published in May and covering April 2025 to March 2026, have no catering category. The closest is Restaurants & Food, which mixes caterers with restaurants. Its median cost per click was $2.05, its median conversion rate 8.05% and its median cost per lead $30.57. Across every industry the median cost per lead was $66.69, so food sits among the cheaper categories to advertise in.

Two cautions. A “lead” in that category includes restaurant actions that are not catering inquiries, so expect office catering terms to run higher than the median in a busy downtown. And a lead is not an order. Judge search on first orders won and what those offices reorder, not on form fills.

Search does one thing a marketplace cannot: it brings the buyer to your own menu and your own order page, so the first order starts a relationship you keep.

Why your own order page decides the math

The cheapest order is the one an office places again without you paying for it. ezCater’s 2026 workplace data, reported in May, found 62% of employees who first try a restaurant at work go on to order from it in their personal lives, and 67% recommend it to family and friends. A good lunch keeps paying after the invoice.

What makes an office order direct the second time is mostly practical. ezCater’s 2024 Feeding the Workplace findings, summarized by the National Restaurant Association Show, found 97% of food-for-work buyers want delivery tracking updates with every order, and 90% are more likely to order where it exists. The same report found 64% of eaters prefer individually packaged meals. If your own order page cannot offer boxed meals, a clear lead time and a text when the van leaves, the office manager goes back to the marketplace because it is easier.

Menu detail matters on both. ezCater says descriptive menus get twice as many bookings on its site, with photos, multiple dietary options, drinks and desserts, and both individual packaging and tray options. Put the same menu on your own site, as text, so a buyer who searches for you by name sees the same thing.

A way to rank the three

For most office caterers the order is:

• Repeat offices first. A reorder reminder, a standing-order option and a contact who hears from you before the holidays. This is the lowest-cost order there is.
• Search second. Campaigns built around office terms in the neighborhoods you deliver to, landing on an order page that works on a phone, with the lead time stated up top.
• The marketplace third, for reach. Keep the listing strong for new buyers, then invite offices that order twice to order direct.

Answering matters across all three. An office manager ordering for tomorrow at 4 pm rarely leaves a message, and an order that does not get through by phone usually goes to whoever picks up next.

What we are telling clients

• Get your marketplace commission terms in writing so you can compare them with search at all.
• Count first orders and reorders by source, not inquiries, and keep weddings out of the same average.
• Build an order page with boxed and tray options, lead times and delivery updates before you spend more on search.
• Run search on office terms separately from wedding terms, in the neighborhoods you can deliver to on time.
• Set a reorder reminder for every office that has ordered twice.
• Write down which offices ordered last November and December, and plan to contact them in September.

The marketplace finds offices, search finds offices that want you specifically, and your own follow-up keeps them. How we run the search side is on our Google Ads page, the follow-up is built on GoHighLevel, and the wider plan for the trade is on our page for caterers.