"We were managing our catering business manually pretty much." That's how Michael Cassano, CEO of The Tomato Shack, describes catering before CaterZen.
The Tomato Shack is a restaurant business in the Philadelphia area, and it has run on our catering software since 2013. Today it handles catering for three locations from one system. We sat down with Michael to hear how it got there.
Printed Tickets and Manually Updated Spreadsheets
Catering ran on an old POS system. The team entered each order, printed the long ticket receipts and worked from them. A couple of spreadsheets, updated by hand, covered production. Michael's summary of the whole process is "just very inefficient."
I've heard some version of this from a lot of caterers over the years. Paper and spreadsheets can hold up at one location. They get harder to keep up with as you grow.
How Does CaterZen Help Three Locations Work Together?
The Tomato Shack has grown from one location to three, with a fourth on the way, and every location works from the same CaterZen system. Michael says having everybody on the same page has been a benefit.
It changed what his managers do, too. CaterZen freed up a lot of their time to manage the business instead of printing reports and taking calls from other locations and from clients.
Since they signed on, Michael says their catering business has more than doubled.
He's not sure they could have kept up "if we were doing it the old-fashioned way."
What The Tomato Shack Team Relies On
✅ Kitchen Production Reports
Each station gets an aggregate of the day, a single count of everything it needs to produce across all orders, which Michael finds really helpful. Here's more on how our kitchen production reports keep the kitchen on top of every order.
✅ Labels
They like the labeling feature, too. Staff print labels they can easily slap on the food once it's completed. If you're curious what goes on a good one, here's what belongs on a catering label.
✅ The Delivery Manager
The Delivery Manager is another favorite. It lets the team see exactly where deliveries are headed. Our Delivery Manager lets you build routes and assign drivers, who can use the CaterZen Driver's App on iOS or Android.
✅ Credit Card Payments and New Features
The Tomato Shack processes all of its credit card transactions through CaterZen. Michael likes that we're always developing new features, like emailing a client a request to enter their card information. Features like that, he says, go a long way toward easing the process and giving customers what they want. Here's more on our catering payment processing, and on CaterPay, our catering-focused processing with next-day funding.
Easy to Learn, With Support Behind It
Michael calls the software very user-friendly. A new trainee doesn't take days to train. It takes hours, if that.
Every issue he's had has been met with an answer. He points to the back end of CaterZen, which he describes as a glossary of everything the system can do, and says reaching out to the support team has been beneficial. That's a credit to our support team.
What you get, in his words, is "user friendly software and then there is that support behind it."
See It for Yourself
If your catering still runs on printed tickets and spreadsheets, I'd love to show you what The Tomato Shack runs on. Start with a free trial, or book a walkthrough.
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Read more client testimonials and case studies from caterers who run on CaterZen.
