For delivered catering
Catering websites for the buffets, platters and office lunches ordered every week
Delivered catering is bought by people in a hurry: an office manager with a meeting on Thursday, a family arranging a wake, a school planning a sports day. The website that wins those orders reads like a clear order sheet, with packages, a price per head and the deadline for ordering.
- Price from
- £1,400
- Build time
- 14 working days
- Built by
- Coltura
- Growth Care™
- £149 a month
One-off, for a Growth Website of up to 6 pages.
From agreed direction to launch.
Our studio in Didsbury, Manchester.
Optional. Cancel any time, with a month’s notice.
How your customers choose
Ordered by organisers, in a hurry, with someone else to answer to.
Much delivered catering is repeat business from people who are not food lovers: office managers, PAs and facilities teams with a meeting to feed and a budget code to put it against. Win that person once and they may order from you for years.
When it is urgent
Food for tomorrow, or for Friday's funeral
Short-notice orders are a big part of this work: a meeting booked this morning, a wake arranged in a hurry. They want your cut-off for next-day orders, your delivery area and a phone number that gets answered. If the site does not say how much notice you need, they assume you cannot do it.
When it is considered
A regular supplier for the office
An office manager choosing a regular caterer compares two or three, often needs a price for approval, and wants to be invoiced rather than pay by card each time.
What wins their trust, what loses it, and what they search for
What makes them trust you
- Delivery windows you keep
- A named person who answers the phone
- Invoicing for business customers
- Clear terms for changing numbers late
What makes them leave
- A PDF menu that will not open properly on a phone
- No cut-off time or delivery area anywhere on the page
- Having to ring to find out the minimum order
- A contact form with no idea when they will hear back
What they type into Google
- “buffet delivery near me”
- “sandwich platters delivered”
- “office lunch catering”
- “funeral buffet”
- “wake catering”
- “working lunch delivery”
- “vegan platters”
- “party food delivery”
People search for the job and the area, often with a town or a business park on the end. Each kind of order deserves its own page in the words they type, with your delivery area named in plain text rather than left for Google to guess from a postcode.
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A wake arranged at a few days' notice
Funeral catering is one of the most common short-notice jobs a caterer takes, and it is booked by families at a hard time, often by someone who has never ordered catering before. A separate, gently written page helps: simple packages, how much notice you need, whether you can deliver to the church hall, the club or the pub, and a phone number that gets answered.
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It is also a page a local funeral director or venue can pass on when a family asks who does the food, and it saves the family explaining their situation more than once.
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Prices per head on the page, or a phone call every time
Plenty of caterers keep prices off the website because every job is different. For delivered buffets, the result is that each enquiry starts with the same question and some people never ask it. Publishing a starting price per head for each package filters out enquiries that were never going to fit the budget and speeds up the ones that will.
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You do not need to publish every variation. A clear from price, a note on what changes it, such as numbers, delivery distance, hot food or staff to serve, and a short quote form for anything larger is enough to turn the website into something people can actually order from.
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Labels, allergens and the vegan platter nobody wants to guess about
When food is delivered to a room full of people, the person who ordered it gets the questions about what is in it. Office buyers want to choose dietary options at the order stage and receive platters that arrive labelled. The website is where you show how you handle that: which options you offer, how items are labelled, and how customers can get full information on the fourteen allergens UK food law requires businesses to declare.
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Being clear about it before the order is placed saves the Friday afternoon phone call, and gives a nervous buyer a reason to pick you over a caterer who is vaguer about it.
04 / 04
Advertising for office accounts, and keeping the order sheet current
Paid search can work for delivered catering because the good customers repeat. One office account may be worth a year of orders, so a modest campaign aimed at business searches in your delivery area is worth testing, provided the site records which quote requests and calls it produced. Party buffets for private customers are more often won through reviews and recommendations.
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Once the site is live, prices and packages have to keep up with your costs. On Growth Care you send the new menu or prices and they are changed, and every quarter the site's figures are reviewed and the one change most likely to bring in more orders is made.
What the website needs
The catering site, page by page
It works like an order sheet, so a buyer can price, approve and order without picking up the phone.
Homepage. Your delivery area, the order cut-off, the main packages with a price per head, and a way to order or call.
A page per package. What is in it, how many it serves, the dietary options, and a link a buyer can send for approval.
Office and business catering. Regular orders and invoicing, written for the person who holds the budget.
Funeral and wake catering. Written gently, with the notice you need.
Allergens and dietary needs. How food is labelled, and how to get full allergen information.
Delivery and ordering. Areas, charges, delivery windows, minimum numbers and cut-off times.
The enquiry route, and what to leave out
The enquiry route
From “we need lunch for twelve on Thursday” to a confirmed order
- The buyer picks a package and sees the price per head and the minimum numbers.
- The order form asks for the date, delivery time, address, numbers and dietary needs.
- It shows the cut-off plainly, and anything bigger or unusual goes to a short quote form instead.
- The confirmation says when you will be in touch, and whether business customers can pay on account.
Leave it out
What not to put on the site
- Stock photos of buffets that are not yours
- Packages you no longer make
- Out-of-date delivery charges
- A line saying “allergen information available on request” with no way to request it
Proof and credentials
What a buyer checks before feeding a room full of colleagues
The person who orders gets the blame if the food is late or someone is caught out. Food businesses have more checkable evidence than most; the allergen rules are covered above.
What to show, item by item
- Your food hygiene rating
- In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, councils rate food businesses under the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme, and Scotland runs the Food Hygiene Information Scheme. Displaying the rating at the premises is a legal requirement in Wales and Northern Ireland, and showing it on the site is one of the first things a careful buyer looks for.
- Registered with your council
- Food businesses must register with their local authority at least 28 days before they start trading, home kitchens included. A line saying you are registered, and where your kitchen is, reassures a buyer who has never heard of you.
- Photos of what actually arrives
- Real platters photographed as they are delivered. Buyers want to know what the table will look like when people walk in.
- Reviews from businesses
- Ask office customers directly, because they rarely leave a review unprompted. A line about punctual deliveries from one office manager carries weight with the next.
The standard of build
There is no demonstration site for a catering business, and one borrowed from another sector would not tell you much. Every site is designed and built from scratch around the business, works properly on a phone and is yours outright. If you want to see the standard of build first, three demonstration sites for invented businesses, a roofer, a dental practice and a wine bar, are on the examples page.
See the demonstration sitesIn our clients’ words
What our clients say.
Questions
The questions caterers ask.
How is a catering website different from an event catering website?
Delivered catering is bought often, at short notice, by people who want a reliable order sheet: packages, prices, cut-off times and invoicing. Event catering is bought once, months ahead, by couples or planners comparing the whole service, from staff to crockery. The two need different pages and different enquiry forms. If you do both, the homepage should give each buyer its own clear route.
Can a caterer appear on Google Maps without premises customers visit?
Yes. If customers never visit your kitchen, you can register on Google Business Profile as a service-area business, hide your address and list the areas you deliver to, although you still need a genuine address for verification. The profile is set up that way and linked to your site, and the website states the same service area in plain text, so what Google shows and what visitors read agree.
Can regular business customers order without calling every time?
Yes. A page for each package means a regular customer can send a link to colleagues for approval and then order in a couple of minutes, and a business account means they are invoiced rather than paying each time. If you already use an online ordering system for catering, the site can send people straight to it instead.
The offer in brief
Five answers that are the same for every business we build for. Open any of them.
What does it cost, and what is included?
Growth Websites start at £1,400, one-off, for a complete rebuild of up to 6 pages with setup included. A larger site is the Signature Website, at £3,500. Up to six pages, which for a catering business usually means a homepage that works like an order sheet, a packages page, pages for office catering and funeral catering, and a clear allergens and delivery page. You also get an order and quote form, your Google Business Profile set up for the area you deliver to, and tracking so you can see which pages bring in orders.
All nine parts are included:
- Growth Audit
- Offer and Messaging Rebuild
- Complete Website Rebuild
- Conversion Optimisation
- Local Search Foundation
- AI Search Readiness
- Conversion Tracking
- Performance Optimisation
- Launch Support
How long does it take, and what do you need from me?
About 14 working days from agreed direction to launch. You watch the real site take shape on a private link, with one round of considered changes before launch. What we need from you: your current packages and prices, your delivery area and cut-off times, your food hygiene rating, and photos of platters as they actually go out. Beyond that, about half an hour on the phone; we write the copy.
Who builds it?
Coltura, an independent digital studio in Didsbury, Manchester. We do every audit and every build in-house, so you deal directly with the studio doing the work. We take on a limited number of builds at once, which is why there is sometimes a short wait before a build starts.
Do I have to pay every month?
No. Growth Care is £149 a month if you want it, and entirely optional. It covers hosting and security, monitoring, content changes within a fair monthly allowance, a plain-English monthly report, a quarterly conversion review and messaging us directly. Cancel any time, with a month's notice. You are also free to host the site yourself.
What if it is not right for us?
The audit and the direction come before you commit. If the plan is the wrong fit for your business, you can walk away and keep the audit. You own the site, the domain and the content outright, and after launch anything that does not work the way it was built to work is fixed at no charge for 30 days.
Where to next
Also for caterers:
Related trades we build for:
Next steps
Find out what your website is costing you.
Ask for the free Growth Audit of your current site. Then try ordering from it on your phone as a busy office manager would: can you find a price per head, the cut-off for tomorrow and whether you deliver to their postcode, without ringing? Each one you cannot find is an order going to the supermarket instead.
Done by hand and back within 48 hours. You can have it without a phone call.
Or ring us on 07958 394808Or start on your own
- Instant website check: one page checked, with the evidence for each finding.
- Revenue leak calculator: what more enquiries would be worth, worked out from your own numbers.