Women-Owned Catering

Women’s History Month covers all of March. The date that lands on a work calendar is International Women’s Day, March 8, a fixed date marked in most countries a company has offices in.

Being a calendar date rather than a floating Monday, it moves across the week. Some years it falls on a Saturday, and the office order goes on the Friday before. Check the weekday before you promise anyone food.

Offices tend to mark the day in the morning, ahead of the meetings, which makes the order breakfast more often than lunch. Pick the shape of it from our breakfast catering page.

A spend filter normally costs you something. Narrow a vendor list far enough and you order what is left instead of what the team asked for.

This one does not. No cuisine sits behind the filter, so the list reaches across the menus and service styles an office already buys: boxed lunches, hot buffets, breakfast trays, platters for a long meeting. It reaches across delivery areas too, which is where a filter usually breaks.

Nothing about the order has to change. Same lunch, same Tuesday, same headcount, placed with a different business. Start from the diverse-owned catering directory and work down to your city.

A caterer who can hold a standing Tuesday is a different business from a restaurant that takes catering when the dining room is quiet. What separates them is which service the kitchen was set up to sell.

Kay Ch’ien worked as a corporate lawyer in New York before she started Hey Hey Canteen, and she told us she built it around lunch rather than late nights and weekends: warm bowls, salads, noodles and dumplings, light enough to eat every day. A kitchen designed that way takes a recurring midday order without it costing anyone a favor.

Nine other owners walk the same ground in our interviews with them.

March 8 is a single date, so a company with offices in four cities has four orders to place on one morning. A short vendor list fails here first: two sites get something worth eating and the rest get whatever the nearest chain drops off.

CaterAi works one address at a time, and that is the useful part. Each site gets kitchens that deliver to it, rather than one national account stretched over all four.

If procurement counts this spend, the credential to ask about is WBENC certification, from the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council. How the reporting is put together sits on our minority-owned catering page.