How To Sell Meal Plans and Catering to Companies
Here’s a story about a food business you’ve probably never heard that deserves your attention if you want to scale up.
In 1999, Jason Finger had just started his law career, which meant long nights at the office and greasy takeout dinners at his desk. In order to get credit card points, Finger started collecting the team’s order for late night dinners and submitting receipts to accounting for reimbursement.
What irked Finger was dealing with the expense process. He’d have to write out details of each dinner on the receipt, turn in each receipt and then categorize each receipt for accounting purposes.
Frustrated with the process of calling restaurants to order and dealing with the expense system, he started one of the first online ordering platforms, SeamlessWeb (now GrubHub).
Why should you care about Jason Finger’s story?
Because he cracked the code selling food services to corporate clients and you should consider following his lead.
When I ran my meal delivery business, we followed the “Seamless playbook” to sell meals to businesses. Below is a high level description of our process that helped us land many of the biggest companies in Atlanta as clients:
Find target companies that match your criteria. Consider factors such as sector, number of employees, and location. These attributes define the kind of company you want to target and sell to. An example might be a healthcare businesses with over 100 employees, based in Cleveland, that has 3 office managers on LinkedIn.
Build a list of “food decision makers” at each company in excel. I’d suggest using LinkedIn sales navigator for this task.
Food decision makers are often Office Managers or Administrative Assistants.
Sending free food as a starting point is highly effective. Consider emailing them to ask if they would be open to receiving a sample of your meals or a week of lunches to begin a partnership conversation.
After building a relationship, engage through emails and calls to offer value to the office manager, aiming to make their life easier. Potential services could include providing an office fridge, catering meals, or assisting in developing a 'food as medicine' program. Truly, the sky is the limit when designing a revenue strategy targeted at businesses.
If you’d like more discrete strategy tips or want to hear how Bottle can help you grow your revenue, we’d be happy to share more tactics directly.
Of interest
I’ll be hitting the road this weekend with my family (5-hour road trip with 3 kids under 5, let’s goooo!). When we get on the highway, the first thing we’ll see is a Buc-ee’s billboard with the slogan, '88 miles - you can hold it!'.
You can bet we’ll be stopping at at least one Buc-ee’s on our drive. If you haven’t heard of Buc-ee’s, it’s a gas station that’s developed a cult following for its hospitality and insane number of gas pumps.
Here’s a cool feature if you’re interested in learning more.
Up Next
On April 11th at 11am ET, we’ll be hosting Laura Fryer from Blue Hominy Public Relations for our next coffee chat. Laura works with some of the nation’s top food and beverage businesses to help them get press. She’s an expert on what it takes to get a food business featured in local and national publications. We hope you’ll join us to hear Laura’s tactics and tips for building an amazing press strategy.