In this article
Within a ten-minute walk of your restaurant sit hundreds of people who have to eat every working day. Almost no independent venue sells them anything.
Tuesday, 12:40. Your room is a third full, your chef is standing there anyway, the heating is on and the rent is running. Across the road, eighty people are sitting at desks. Fifteen of them are eating a supermarket sandwich at that same desk — not because your food is worse, but because nobody ever offered them the alternative.
This is the cheapest growth there is. It fills exactly the window that sits emptiest on your rota, it needs next to no advertising budget, and it is the only channel in hospitality you can put on paper instead of hoping for.
Below are the four ways you sell to those buildings, ranked by what each one costs your kitchen in spare capacity — with what it is, how you pitch it, and the volume below which it stops being worth the trouble. Plus a calculator that works out what your empty lunch window is worth, and what the discount you put on it costs you per year.
Why the offices round the corner are your cheapest growth
The lunch window is capacity you already pay for. The rent, the heating, the chef who is in for mise-en-place anyway: those costs run whether twelve people or forty walk in. Every extra cover in that window carries almost no new fixed cost. The same cover on a full Saturday night does cost you something — there it displaces another one.
And yes, home working changed that market. Eurostat puts the share of employed people in the EU who worked from home at least sometimes at around 22% in 2024, against roughly 12% in 2019 — it has about doubled in five years. Read that honestly: the office lunch has not disappeared, it has concentrated. Tuesday to Thursday have become the office days. That is not a reason to skip this; it is a reason to sell to the days the people are actually there — which happen to be the days that sit quietest on your own rota.
The third argument is the strongest and the least often made: this is the only channel you can put under contract. A discount promotion buys attention for one week. A standing lunch account is simply on next month's rota, and the month after that.
Free guide The complete marketing guide for your restaurant From your Google profile to your quiet Tuesday — every channel in one place. Read the guideThe 4 channels, ranked by what they cost your kitchen
Ask an owner about corporate lunch and you get one picture back: a fixed order at a discount. That is channel 2 of four — and it is the one that costs your kitchen the most spare capacity. The other three are rarely considered, and one of them costs you no covers at all.
They are ordered below by what they cost your kitchen, from nothing to a lot. For each: what it is, what it costs, how you pitch it, and the floor below which it does not pay for the journey.
1. Ad-hoc orders: start free, promise nothing
Somebody walks in, rings up, or orders through your own site. No agreement, no contract, no discount: just your menu price. This is the channel every venue already has and almost nobody does anything about.
What it costs your kitchen is not weight but unpredictability. You cannot roster on it and you cannot buy for it. Twelve lunch orders landing between 12:00 and 12:20 on a day you had marked as quiet is not revenue, it is a problem. The fix is not more staff but an ordering window that closes half an hour earlier.
You do not really pitch this one — you make yourself findable and easy. A readable lunch board at the door (not on the façade: at the door, at the eye level of somebody walking past). Your lunch menu on your Google profile before eleven, because that is when people search on their phone. And one ordering channel that needs no app. If you want one action you could take today: print fifty menu cards and walk them into the receptions on your own street. That costs one afternoon.
Floor: none. This channel costs you nothing and you can start today — which is exactly why it is where you start, rather than the one you skip because it looks small.
2. The standing lunch account: predictable, and you pay for it
The same office, the same weekday or weekdays, a fixed or short rotating menu, one invoice a month, usually at a volume discount of eight to fifteen per cent. This is what people mean when they say "corporate lunch".
It costs the most capacity of the four channels and — more importantly — you commit that capacity before you know what else the day will bring. Your mise-en-place gets planned around it rather than fitted in. Against that stands the one thing this trade almost never has for sale: revenue you can put on next month's rota with a straight face.
You pitch it to the office manager, the executive assistant, or whoever books the meeting rooms — not the managing director, who does not decide this, and not the front desk, which will give you a generic e-mail address. Bring: one sheet with three prices, the delivery time, the cancellation notice and your phone number. And ask for one day a week, not five. One Tuesday is a decision one person can take on their own; a full week is a procurement process with three quotes attached.
Floor: count on at least eight covers per delivery day. Below that you are paying somebody to drive for the money of two main courses, and it is not a channel any more, it is a favour.
On the left, what the channel costs your kitchen in spare capacity. On the right, how predictable the revenue is. The two do not move together — and that is the whole reason to keep them apart.
The bars are a ranking, not a measurement: they say the four are not interchangeable, not that channel 2 "scores a 3". Look especially at the bottom row — the channel with the lowest capacity cost is not the channel with the lowest return.
3. Meeting and event catering: the biggest ticket, the most logistics
One-off and larger: a training day, a client meeting, an opening, a leaving do. Fifteen to sixty people, ordered days ahead, and paid for the format — trays, presentation, delivery on the hour — rather than for the food alone.
The margin here is better than on a discounted account, precisely because there is no volume discount against it. What it does cost is real logistics: packaging, transport, a delivery slot that has to be exact, and somebody out of the kitchen at 11:20 while your own lunch service is starting. Do not underestimate that last part; it is why most venues do this once and then stop.
The thing that separates the venues who make money here is not the pitch but the follow-up. An office that ordered once almost always orders again — and almost never gets rung back. One line in your diary is enough: "Nordic Agency, ordered 12 March, ring in June." Do that three times and within a year you have a second channel that cost you no advertising at all.
Floor: put a minimum amount on it, not a minimum head count. Eight expensive lunch boxes can work; twenty three-euro sandwiches rarely do.
4. Bulk gift cards: revenue without a single cover
An office buys a batch of your own gift cards in one go: as an end-of-year gift, as a thank-you to a team, as a long-service present. Forty cards at twenty-five euro is a thousand euro that arrives today and costs your kitchen nothing today.
This channel is fundamentally different from the three above, which is why it sits apart: it is a financial product, not a commitment of covers. You promise no capacity, no delivery slot and no day. The guests arrive in twos, spread over months, usually at moments you could never have planned — and they nearly always spend more than the value of the card. That is exactly why it is bottom of the capacity-cost ranking and not bottom of the earnings list.
You pitch it in November and early December, and again around May. One e-mail to every office you delivered to in the past year does it: we do gift cards, this is what one looks like, we can have forty ready by Thursday. If you do not yet have one that looks decent, the free gift card designer lets you design and print your own, and the gift cards page sets out what one costs you as an operator.
Floor: twenty cards. Below that it is an ordinary sale rather than a partnership — and you need no separate proposal for it.
An office rarely starts at a contract. Almost always it walks these four rungs — and each rung makes the next one easier, because by then you are no longer a stranger.
The point of this ladder is the follow-up, not the sale. Every rung above is a conversation you have to start yourself; ring nobody back and every office stays on rung one forever.
How to knock on the building next door
Find the right person. That is the office manager, the executive assistant, or whoever runs the meeting rooms — not the managing director, who does not decide this, and not the front desk, which will hand you a generic e-mail address. Just ask at reception: "who arranges lunch here?" That single question is eighty per cent of the job, and it needs no skill at all.
Bring one sheet. Three prices, one delivery time, one phone number, one cancellation rule. No brochure, no folder, no QR code pointing at a PDF. And bring something edible — a tray of exactly what you would deliver on a Tuesday. A tasting weighs more than a menu, because the objection was never the price: the objection is that they do not know whether it is any good.
Go between half nine and eleven, or after half two. Never during their lunch and never during yours. And go back. The first no is almost always "we already have something", and that becomes a yes in the week their current supplier runs late. Whoever rings again three months later wins that conversation without ever having had to sell anything.
Work out what your empty lunch window is worth
Before you offer a discount it helps to know two things: what the window is worth at full price, and what that discount costs you per year. The second number surprises most owners.
Fill in what you genuinely have empty, not what you would like to fill. The calculator shows its own working, so you can redo it next week on the back of a delivery note without this page open.
What is your empty lunch window worth?
Five numbers. The output works out what your spare capacity earns, how many standing accounts it takes to fill it, and what the discount costs you per year.
—
—
Everything is calculated in your browser; nothing is stored or sent. The output is an order of magnitude to open a conversation with, not a forecast — your own kitchen cost per cover is what finally decides whether a ten per cent discount is affordable.
The figure that surprises most is the third one: what the discount costs. Ten per cent on a hundred and twenty covers a week is a real annual payment for predictability. It can be worth it — an empty seat returns nought per cent, so ten per cent of something beats a hundred per cent of nothing — but it should be a decision, not a detail you drift into.
Look at the number of accounts too. If it says six, there are very few streets with six offices willing to say yes at the same time. That is precisely the moment to look at channels 3 and 4 rather than to discount harder.
Where it goes wrong
You invoice, and you get paid late. A private guest pays before leaving; a business pays on terms. Directive 2011/7/EU sets a default payment period of 30 days for business-to-business transactions, extendable by agreement to 60 days where that is not grossly unfair to the creditor, with late payment automatically carrying statutory interest at the ECB reference rate plus eight percentage points and at least 40 euro in recovery costs per invoice. Put the term on your quote, invoice weekly rather than monthly for the first three months, and stop delivering at thirty days overdue. That is not being harsh — that is the rule you are entitled to.
The office cancels without telling you. Put the cancellation notice on that same sheet: twenty-four hours before the delivery day, in writing, below which it gets invoiced. Nobody argues about a rule they accepted in writing at a moment when it did not yet matter. Ask for that rule on the day itself and it is a row instead.
You sell capacity you need on a normal day. A standing account is there every week, including the first sunny Thursday in April when your terrace is full. Sell your slack, not your dining room. When in doubt, take one day fewer than you think you can handle: extending an account is a phone call, trimming one is losing a customer.
One office becomes too big. Concentration risk is real here: one restructuring, one relocation or one new office manager and half your lunch revenue is gone inside a month. Spread it over three smaller accounts rather than one large one, even though the large one is easier to serve and pleasanter to negotiate.
Your first month, in three steps
You do not have to open all four channels at once. This is the order that costs you least, and it fits in the hours you are not already working.
Week 1 — just look at who is there
- Walk ten minutes in every direction and write down every building with more than ten desks. The dental practice, the law firm and the garage too: they eat as well.
- Find the name of whoever arranges lunch in each one. Asking at reception works better than the website.
- Note who already delivers there. A sandwich van at 11:45 is not a competitor but information: that building already buys lunch, so the question is answered.
Week 2 — start with the channel that costs nothing
- Put your lunch menu on your Google profile before eleven, every day.
- Hang a readable lunch board at the door, at the eye level of somebody walking past.
- Walk fifty menu cards into the receptions on your list yourself.
- Make sure there is one ordering channel that needs no app and no account.
Weeks 3–4 — ask for one day
- Pick the three nearest buildings on your list and call in between half nine and eleven.
- Ask for one weekday, not five, and agree a two-month trial.
- Bring one sheet with three prices, the delivery time and your number — and a tray to taste.
- Put the cancellation notice and the payment term on that sheet before anybody asks for them.
In closing
The four channels are not a menu you pick the best one from. They are a ladder: one office almost always walks all four of them over a year, and each rung is easier than the last because by then you are not a stranger. Aim only at rung two and you miss the rung that costs nothing and the rung with the biggest ticket.
No advertising budget is involved. What is involved is a list of buildings, one sheet of paper and a Tuesday morning you had nothing on anyway. Most owners who genuinely try this once are surprised less by how much yes there is than by how few of their neighbours have ever asked.
And the window it fills is the window you are already paying for. That is the whole calculation.