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The catering industry operates in two worlds at once: large, plannable orders with advance notice—and a daily core business consisting of repeat corporate clients, meeting catering, and last-minute orders. The orders are set, but the quantities involved often aren’t: How many sandwiches for the all-you-can-eat lunch buffet? How much should be set aside for last-minute orders? How much raw inventory should be kept on hand?
It is precisely in this gray area between fixed orders and open demand that the surpluses and shortages of everyday catering operations arise.
The Two Parts of Catering Planning
The fixed portion: confirmed orders. Event catering and pre-booked venues represent guaranteed sales—here, what’s needed isn’t a forecast, but proper order management. The mistake happens elsewhere: when these fixed volumes are mixed with unmet demand in the planning process.
The flexible half: day-to-day operations. Open lunch menus, on-demand meeting catering, same-day orders: This demand fluctuates depending on the day of the week, holidays, the weather, and the schedules of corporate clients—making it a classic forecasting scenario.
What Automation Looks Like in Practice
Separate fixed and variable demand clearly. The most important step is conceptual: Confirmed orders are treated as guaranteed quantities, while variable demand is forecasted separately. “ GoNina ” learns the patterns of the underlying business from sales data—by product and customer segment—and uses this to generate daily volume recommendations for the next seven days. The sum of these two figures determines the production and purchasing volumes.
Take advantage of corporate customers’ patterns. Corporate customers place orders in patterns: meeting days, monthly cycles, vacation periods. These patterns are embedded in the historical data—the model recognizes them and schedules for the slow weeks just as it does for the busy ones.
Align purchasing and production with the weekly schedule. A seven-day lead time makes fresh-goods purchasing more precise and production planning more manageable—fewer costly emergency purchases, less excess inventory that has to be disposed of on Friday.
The results are in line with the well-known effects: up to 52% less surplus, up to 6% more revenue, and up to 12 hours saved in planning time per month—time that can be directly allocated to new business development and customer service within the catering business.
Best Practices for Catering Businesses
1. Set and communicate order deadlines deliberately. The sooner orders are finalized, the smaller the remaining volume that needs to be forecasted—favorable terms for early orders shift the risk from the company to the customer.
2. Data-driven reserves instead of a flat rate. “Always 20% more” is expensive. The data shows on which days of the week spontaneous orders actually come in—set aside reserves specifically for those days, but not for the others.
3. Track the number of items discarded per product. What is discarded at the end of the day is the most important feedback for planning—without this figure, any optimization efforts are in the dark.
Frequently Asked Questions
Our business is heavily event-driven—does a forecast even help?
Not for the events themselves—those are set in stone. But almost every catering business has a daily core operation running alongside them—and that’s exactly where the hidden, daily losses occur, which a forecast helps eliminate.
We plan based on recipe components, not finished products—is that possible?
Yes. Forecasts at the product level can be translated into component and raw material requirements using recipes—which serves as the basis for more precise orders.
Conclusion
Catering planning becomes easy when you break it down into two parts: managing confirmed orders and forecasting demand. Those who plan their core business using data gain an advantage precisely in the areas where money is quietly lost every day in the catering industry—in excess inventory, purchasing, and planning time.
To learn how AI forecasting works in the restaurant industry as a whole, check out the complete guide for the restaurant industry.
