How to Get Catering Orders From Your Restaurant's Instagram

A tray of mandi that feeds twenty people takes your kitchen about the same amount of attention as six individual orders, and it goes out the door in one trip. Most owners we work with in Dearborn and Detroit already know this. What they do not have is a steady way to get those orders. They come in by word of mouth, from the same four families, and they stop when those families stop having events. If you want to know how to market restaurant catering using the account you already run, the short version is that you have to stop treating catering buyers like dinner customers, because they are not scrolling for tonight.

A catering buyer is shopping weeks before the event

Someone who sees your lamb at 7pm on a Tuesday is deciding where to eat in the next hour. Someone planning a graduation party, a 40-person work lunch, an open house at a dealership, or food for a mosque event is deciding three to six weeks out. They are not hungry. They are making a list.

That person has a completely different set of questions than your walk-in customer. How many people does a full tray feed. How much notice do you need. Do you deliver to Southfield or only within a few miles. Do you bring chafing dishes and sterno or does it arrive in foil pans. Is there a deposit. Can they pick it up at 11 so it is hot at noon.

Your feed almost certainly answers none of this. It shows beautifully lit plates of food for one. So the catering buyer sees your restaurant, thinks "that looks good," and then goes and calls a place that has an actual catering page because that place made it easy. The food was never the problem.

Shoot the tray, not the plate

The single biggest fix is visual. Catering looks like volume. A full-size aluminum tray packed edge to edge, a line of trays on a table, a stack of containers going into the back of a car, a setup on a folding table at an office with the lids off and steam coming up. That image does work your plated hero shot cannot do, because it tells someone's brain "this would feed my room."

Shoot it during a real catering order, not a staged one. You are already making the food. The whole thing takes a few minutes while the trays are sitting on the pass. Get the trays from above, get one shot at a slight angle so you can see the depth, and if the customer is fine with it, get the setup at the destination. Those destination photos are the most persuasive assets you will ever have for catering and almost nobody collects them.

If nobody on staff wants to be in frame, you do not need them to be. Hands and trays carry this entirely.

Put the numbers in the caption instead of the DMs

Every unanswered logistical question is a reason to call someone else. So answer them in public, in the caption, in plain text.

"Half tray feeds 8 to 10. Full tray feeds 18 to 22. 48 hours notice. Delivery within 15 miles." That is not a glamorous caption. It is the caption that gets you the order, because the person planning the event can screenshot it and send it to whoever controls the budget.

Do the same thing with a pinned highlight on Instagram called Catering. Put the tray photos in it, the sizes, the notice you need, and the phone number as text on the last frame. People will look at that highlight at 11pm when you are closed. Make it so they can get the information without you.

If you have a printed catering menu, photograph it flat and clean and put it in that highlight too. A PDF nobody can open on a phone does you no good.

Post catering on a schedule, not when you remember

Catering posts feel like a waste in the moment because they do not get the same engagement as a cheese pull. They are not supposed to. They are there so that when a person's cousin is put in charge of food for a party, your restaurant is one of the two places they can picture.

Once a week is enough. Same slot every week. The point is that over a few months, anyone who follows you knows you cater without ever having to ask. We build that into the posting calendar for the restaurants we run so it does not depend on anyone remembering on a Friday.

Meta ads can put catering in front of a radius, not a job title

This is worth being honest about. You cannot reliably tell Meta to show your ad to office managers in Dearborn who order lunch. Targeting by job title is not something you should build a plan on.

What you can do is run an ad with tray photos to a tight radius around the places that order food in volume: office parks, dealerships, medical buildings, campuses. You can run it with a message that says exactly what you cater and what the lead time is, and send it to a WhatsApp or phone call instead of a website nobody fills out. And you can run it ahead of the seasons when people book, rather than during them, because the booking happens first.

Ad spend goes straight to Meta at whatever you set. We do not mark it up, and neither should anyone else.

The order you just delivered is your next three orders

When you drop off forty people's lunch at an office, every one of those people is a potential customer and at least one of them plans the next event. Leave a stack of cards by the trays. Ask the person who booked if you can photograph the setup before people eat. If a guest posts a photo of your trays on their story, save it and repost it.

That cycle costs nothing and it compounds. Most restaurants never start it because the delivery is the end of the job in their head. It is the beginning of the marketing.

If you want catering handled the same way we handle the rest of a restaurant's social — we shoot the trays, write the captions, post on a fixed schedule and track what each post does — book a call and tell us what your kitchen can turn out. One call and a few references from you is the whole lift on your end. Or just call (313) 633-5714 and ask. Corporate and event work lives at /services/events-and-corporate if you want to read it first.