At CaterZen, we’re always looking for ways to help restauranteurs grow their catering businesses, and today, we’re thrilled to introduce our latest resource: the Restaurant Catering Smarts podcast! 🎉

Happy New Year, CaterZen family!

Here’s the deal: I’ve always believed that great catering software isn’t built in a vacuum. It’s crafted through a combination of sweat, innovation, and listening to you—our incredible clients. While you’ve been out delighting your customers with flawless events, we’ve been in the trenches, building tools to make your life easier, your business more profitable, and your competition green with envy.

As we step into 2025, we want to reflect on last year’s achievements and share the game-changing updates coming your way. Let’s dive in!

Before implementing CaterZen, Big Dan’s BBQ relied on a patchwork of tools like Google Calendar, Square, and emails to manage their catering operations. This fragmented system led to frequent mistakes, frustrated customers, and inefficiencies that held back their growth.

CaterZen helped them change the game. By switching to a centralized, all-in-one catering software solution, Big Dan’s BBQ streamlined operations, drastically reduced errors, and saved time for both their team and customers.

If you’re in the catering business, you know the chaos all too well: juggling orders, managing staff, and trying to stay on top of customer expectations. It can feel like an uphill battle. But trust me, it doesn’t have to be this way.

In my recent interview on the Inspired Insider Podcast, I broke down the strategies and systems I’ve used to turn catering chaos into calm—and helped thousands of others do the same.

Before adopting CaterZen, Pasta Pantry’s catering management system was as old-school as it gets: a giant wall calendar. Each day of the year was filled in manually, with additional pages added as orders piled up. While this approach worked in the early days, it quickly became cumbersome as the business grew. Keeping track of past orders or coordinating future ones often required digging through pages and guessing at the details.

In the world of catering, we know success is rooted in the relationships we build and the teams behind the scenes who make it all possible. Today, we’re both celebrating a journey and looking forward to a new one as we say a heartfelt farewell to Meredith Dillard and welcome Jill Hammett as our new Chief Operating Officer at CaterZen.

Red Hot & Blue, a beloved barbecue chain, had been managing their catering operations with outdated software that required manual order entry and lacked the convenience of online ordering. As demand for their catering services grew, General Manager Rachid Elkhasouani found that the manual processes were slowing down their ability to keep up with customer expectations. To meet the needs of their growing customer base and improve efficiency, Rachid knew it was time for a catering software upgrade. That’s when Red Hot & Blue turned to CaterZen.

I just had the honor of being featured on the Catering Cage podcast with Erle Dardick, and we had a blast diving deep into the world of catering technology and how it’s changing the game for restaurants. Erle’s podcast is known for being the place for innovative ideas in catering, and I was thrilled to share my journey from restaurant owner to creating CaterZen, a solution that’s been driving catering success for over 15 years.

You can catch the full podcast interview here:

Delta Blues BBQ, known for its signature smoked meats, started as a catering company before expanding into a full-fledged restaurant. As the business flourished, owner Travis Penn faced increasing challenges managing both sides of the operation with a combination of pen and paper and Google Calendar. This manual process, while simple in the beginning, quickly became a bottleneck as the company’s catering operations grew.

We’ve been tossing around the term “game-changer” for a while, but this time, it’s no exaggeration.

At CaterZen, we’re thrilled to introduce the biggest catering CRM update we’ve ever released—an overhaul that will transform how you manage tasks, reminders, and client follow-ups, all while keeping things simple, organized, and cost-effective.