Get our free one-page cheat sheet of pizzeria cost benchmarks: food, labor, rent and delivery, with a blank for your own numbers.
Tuesday, Sept. 29, was the busiest office day of its week in the U.S., with Kastle’s 10-city badge data at 65.5% of pre-pandemic occupancy against a weekly average of 55.4%. If Tuesday is the day your schedule bleeds, you already know the problem. We put a number on it in where the labor line breaks: a two-person California shift needs about $155 an hour in sales just to cover its own labor. The people who could fill that Tuesday are sitting in conference rooms a mile away, and someone is ordering their lunch.
The catering order is big, but the channel isn’t booming
On ezCater, the largest online catering service in the U.S., the average order is over $400. ezCater’s own 2025 workplace report put the average at $420, up 12%, feeding an average of 25 people. That’s one ticket the size of an entire dead afternoon. Uber thinks enough of the business that this month it agreed to buy ezCater for $2.3 billion.
Don’t mistake that for a gold rush. Technomic data shows catering sales grew just 0.6% last year after surging nearly 69% in 2021. Catering isn’t a rising tide. It’s a fixed pool of office lunches, and the shops that get them take them from someone else.
Chains that work at it get real volume. Nation’s Restaurant News reported that Cava, Moe’s and similar chains have built catering to 5% to 10% of sales, and Qdoba to 11%. Nobody publishes the equivalent for pizzerias.
The cut is smaller than delivery’s, and the ticket is far bigger
ezCater’s partner documentation, dated Sept. 21, lists a 15% commission on marketplace orders and 7% on orders placed through your own website, charged on the food subtotal plus the delivery fee you set, with a 2.99% payment fee on subtotal, delivery fee and tax. Customers who order through your site are yours, and you can export the list.
Run a $400 order with your own driver and a $25 delivery fee. On the marketplace, commission is $63.75 and the payment fee about $12.71, before tax: roughly $76 out of $425. Through your own site, it’s about $42. For comparison, DoorDash’s Plus plan takes 25% of a delivery order, which would be $100 on the same subtotal. That’s our arithmetic on published rates. Your contract wins.
A $400 catering order on a Tuesday doesn’t just add sales. It pays for the shift you were already running.
Delivery is where the margin leaks
A catering order is a big drop at a fixed time, usually with setup. If ezCater’s Dispatch handles it, the fee is a $30 minimum up to a $300 subtotal and 10% of the subtotal above that. On a $400 order that’s $40, and if you charged the customer $25, you pay the $15 difference.
That’s why most operators keep it in-house. Monkey, which sells catering software, says 53% of catering orders in 2026 are delivered in-house, up from 31% in 2021. For a pizzeria, an 11:30 drop on a Tuesday lands in the hours your driver is otherwise folding boxes. The catch is the Friday order. Offices are emptiest at the end of the week, with Kastle data reported in early 2025 putting Friday at 36.7% of pre-pandemic foot traffic. A Friday lunch for 50 that runs into your dinner prep will cost more than it pays.
Three products and one minimum
Start narrow.
The pie pack. Large pies sold by headcount (10, 25, 50) with plates and napkins included. ezCater’s average order feeds 25 people, so price the 25 first.
The travel-proof add-on. A salad tray and a pan of knots or wings. They hold through a 20-minute drive and a slow meeting better than a pie does, and they raise the ticket without adding oven time.
The boxed lunch. A personal pie and a side in one box, for the office that wants individual meals. Jersey Mike’s added options for smaller groups and individually wrapped items to its catering in 2020.
Then set the minimum with arithmetic, not a round number. Add up the fixed cost of one run: driver time and setup. Divide by what you keep from each dollar of the order after food, packaging and commission. That’s the smallest order that doesn’t lose money. Set your minimum above it. Two loaded hours at California’s 2027 minimum is about $39, using our labor math. If you keep 45 cents of every catering dollar, the floor is about $86 before any profit.
Then go after the regulars. Monkey’s data says 60% of catering orders come from 5% of customers. This is an account business. ezCater says 43% of organizations it surveyed run a recurring meal program, and one weekly order is worth more than ten one-off parties.
Free cheat sheet: 15 pizzeria cost benchmarks on one page
Prime cost, labor, delivery and rent, each with its source and a blank for your shop’s number. Enter your email and the download opens right away.
You’ll also get the Oven Scars newsletter. We never sell or share your address.
The limitation: the best catering data comes from companies that sell catering. ezCater, Monkey and the surveys behind them have every reason to make the channel look good, and none of it splits out pizza. ezCater’s fees are also about to belong to Uber, and the deal is expected to close in the coming months. The rates above are the ones published in September. Check them again after the deal closes.
