How Do I Get My Deli Staff to Sell Catering in 2026?

Two ways to move the counter: pay for it, or design for it

Every deli owner who wants more catering ends up choosing between two philosophies, and most pick badly because they only ever hear about one of them.

Option A is the incentive route. You attach money to the outcome. A flat bonus per booked catering order, a percentage of the ticket, a monthly champion prize, a quarterly pool split across the front of house. The logic is clean: staff do what they get paid to do, so pay them to sell catering. The appeal is speed — you can announce it Monday and see behavior change Tuesday. The weakness is that money alone doesn't teach anyone how to answer "how many sandwiches feeds twenty people?" An incentive with no supporting process just makes people anxious about a task they still don't know how to perform. You also inherit credit disputes: the morning associate who mentioned the party tray versus the afternoon associate who took the phone order and collected the deposit.

Option B is the friction route. You don't pay anyone extra. You make catering so structurally easy that offering it costs the associate almost nothing. A laminated menu on the counter where customers already stand. A one-page reference card with the three top platters, the lead time, the delivery minimum, and the radius. A paper order form with checkboxes. A POS button that rings the Italian combo tray in one tap instead of eleven. A tent card at the register that gets the customer to raise the subject first, so the associate only has to close rather than open. Friction removal is durable — it keeps working after the novelty of a bonus wears off, and it costs you a lamination run and an afternoon of POS configuration rather than a permanent line on the labor budget.

The honest answer is that Option A without Option B produces resentment, and Option B without Option A produces a slow drift back to sandwiches. The staff will use the tools when a customer asks and never once initiate. The tools make catering *possible*; the scorecard and the bonus make catering *the job*.

There's a third option people reach for that mostly disappoints: hire a dedicated catering salesperson. At sufficient volume — roughly when catering clears a quarter of revenue or you're fielding more than ten orders a week — a dedicated person pays for themselves. Below that, you've bought a salary to chase a book that isn't there yet, and the counter staff now believe catering is officially Someone Else's Job, which is exactly the belief you were trying to destroy. A hybrid works better: name one or two existing associates as catering leads, give them a larger cut, and let them own quoting and follow-up while everyone else still asks the opening question.

The same tension shows up in adjacent trades and it resolves the same way. A hardware store trying to sell installed projects, a lumber yard pushing delivery and install packages, a butcher counter moving premium cuts and holiday roasts, a bakery selling custom cakes instead of case cookies — in each case the frontline employee is being asked to swap a fast, familiar, low-risk transaction for a slow, unfamiliar, high-consequence one. Nobody does that voluntarily. They do it when the scoreboard changed and the paperwork got shorter.

How to decide which lever you pull first

The sequencing question matters more than the choice. Run a short diagnostic before you spend a dollar.

Start by watching the counter for two full lunch rushes without saying anything. Count how many customers plausibly signal a group need — someone buying six drinks, someone asking for a receipt with a company name, anyone who mentions an office, a game, a team, a shower, a funeral. If those signals are frequent and nobody is asking a single question about catering, you have a *behavior* problem and the scorecard is your first move. If the signals are rare, you have a *demand* problem, and no incentive will conjure catering customers out of a lunch line — you need counter signage, a sandwich-board mention, and outreach to the offices within your delivery radius before you tune anyone's pay.

Second, ask each associate individually: "If a customer asked you right now for food for thirty people next Thursday, what happens?" Their answer tells you everything. If they describe going to find a manager, your problem is authority, not motivation. If they describe not knowing the price, your problem is documentation. If they describe being nervous about the lunch rush getting backed up, your problem is process design. If they say "I'd take it, but nobody ever asks" — now you're at the demand question again.

Third, look at your own numbers before you set a target. Pull the last twelve months of catering orders and separate order count from order value. Most delis discover their catering revenue is concentrated in a handful of repeat corporate accounts and that the counter has almost nothing to do with it. That's a critical finding: it means growth comes from converting walk-in traffic into small first orders — a half tray for a ten-person meeting — rather than from chasing another whale. Small first orders are exactly what a nervous associate can handle, and they're the ones that become repeat accounts.

The order in that diagram is deliberate. Documentation before incentive, incentive before hiring. Paying people to do something they don't know how to do is the most expensive way to learn that you had a training gap.

The scorecard: why speed metrics quietly kill catering

Here's the mechanism most owners never see. If the one number you track is sandwiches per hour, or ticket time, or line length at 12:40, then every second an associate spends saying "are you feeding a group today?" is a second that damages their score. You have built a system that actively punishes the behavior you're asking for, then you wonder why the pep talk didn't stick.

The fix is a weighted multi-KPI scorecard. Write down every outcome a complete deli associate should produce, then weight and score each one. Six outcomes cover it: catering quotes given, platter and tray orders closed, party sub upsells, deposit-secured events, sample offers, and same-day add-ons. Give each a weight from 1 to 5 reflecting how much it matters this quarter, and rate each associate 1 to 5 on performance. The composite is the sum of weight × level across all six.

An associate who's a 5 on speed and a 1 on catering quotes now scores visibly low, and the gap is on paper instead of in your head. That's the entire nudge. Wire the bonus to the composite rather than to any single line, and the only route upward is to start asking the catering question.

Two operational details make or break this. First, publish the matrix where every associate can see their own score and the weights. A private scorecard is just a manager's opinion; a public one is a target. Second, re-weight seasonally and say so out loud. When the holidays arrive or football season starts, raise the weight on tray orders and deposit-secured events overnight. The team re-aims the next shift without a meeting. That agility is the real advantage of a weighted model over a flat commission — you can change what matters in an afternoon.

Keep the weighting honest. If you weight catering quotes at 5 and sandwich accuracy at 1, you'll get quotes and wrecked orders. The scorecard is meant to describe the whole job, not to swing the pendulum from one obsession to another. Most delis land somewhere near equal weight between execution metrics and growth metrics, with the growth side climbing during catering-heavy seasons.

A note on tooling, since this is where owners overspend. You can run this on a whiteboard and a clipboard for a single location, and plenty of successful delis do. Purpose-built sales-performance platforms exist — gamified leaderboard tools, incentive-compensation engines that handle multi-component plans, CRM-hosted custom scorecards — and they're genuinely useful once you're managing dozens of people across several stores, because they automate the data pull and the payout math. For one counter with eight associates, the spreadsheet wins. Buy software when the admin time exceeds the software cost, not before.

What the numbers actually look like

Vague advice is useless at the counter, so here are the concrete shapes these programs take.

Per-order incentive. Two commonly used structures are a percentage of the catering sale in the low single digits, or a flat amount per booked order. The flat structure is easier for staff to understand and easier for you to forecast; the percentage structure aligns better with margin on large orders. Whichever you pick, run the math on your own average catering ticket and your own food cost before you announce it. If your gross margin on a tray is thin, a percentage that felt generous can erase the profit on the order entirely. Start conservative, measure for a month, and raise it if the response is flat — it's far easier to increase an incentive than to claw one back.

Reward the ask, not just the close. Keep a small stack of coffee-shop gift cards or cash in the drawer. When you personally observe an associate offering catering — even to a customer who declines — hand over the reward immediately and name the behavior: "I heard you ask about the platter. That's the job. Coffee's on me." This is the single highest-leverage tactic in the whole playbook, because it reinforces the input rather than the output. Outputs are partly luck; inputs are entirely within the associate's control, and paying for inputs is how habits form. A close rate on catering asks is well under half in most delis, which means an associate on pure close-based commission gets punished by randomness for weeks before their first win. They'll quit asking long before that.

Champion recognition. Monthly, name the associate with the most catering orders — count, not dollar value. Counting orders keeps the contest winnable for part-timers and newer staff; counting dollars hands it permanently to whoever happens to serve the big corporate account. Pair it with a modest cash bonus and a small sign near the register. The sign does more work than the money.

Team goals. Set a weekly order-count target and attach a shared reward — a catered team lunch on Friday, an hour of paid time, whatever fits your budget. Team goals convert peer pressure from an obstacle into an asset. The associate who never asks now has three coworkers gently nudging them, which is far more effective than a manager doing it.

Quarterly pool. Set a quarterly catering revenue target modestly above the prior period, and split a bonus equally across all front-of-house staff if the team hits it. This is the piece that gets the person slicing meat and the person bagging chips invested in the catering workflow running smoothly, because the tray only goes out clean if everyone behind the counter cooperates. Equal splits matter here — a weighted split reintroduces exactly the credit disputes you were trying to avoid.

Contest versus permanent structure. Contests spike effort and then fade, reliably. A permanent structure builds a habit. If you run a contest, keep it to one or two weeks and use it to *launch* a permanent change rather than to substitute for one.

Tracking without admin burden. A paper log at the register with associate initials, customer name, and order size takes seconds per entry and under ten minutes a week to tally. A free web form on a tablet works too. Do not build a tracking system that requires an associate to leave the counter — it will be abandoned inside a week.

Rolling it out without blowing up the lunch rush

Sequencing beats enthusiasm. A rollout that lands all at once on a Monday during a rush produces confusion, resentment, and a quiet return to sandwiches by Thursday.

Week one — documentation only, no ask. Print the one-page Catering Quick Reference and put a copy at every register. Three things on it: the three most popular platters with prices, the lead time, and the delivery minimum with the radius. Laminate the catering menu and place it on the counter where customers already wait. Add a tent card near the register — something like "Feeding a group? Ask us about party platters." Say nothing to the staff about selling. Let the tools exist for a week so the first customer question happens before the first performance expectation.

Week two — roleplay the fear out. Spend ten minutes in the morning huddle on the three objections that actually come up. "I'm not sure how many people" gets "We can do a half tray, that feeds about ten." "That seems expensive" gets "Let me show you the per-person cost." "Can you deliver to my office?" gets "What's the address? Let me check the route." Two-sentence answers, practiced out loud, three times. The resistance you're fighting is not laziness — it's the fear of sounding pushy, of botching an order, of being asked a question they can't answer with a line of customers watching. Rehearsal is the antidote.

Week three — remove the process friction. Put the checkbox order form under the counter: top platters, phone number, pickup time, done. Program the POS shortcut for the two or three most common trays. Raise the manager-approval threshold so associates can take routine orders without leaving the counter. Audit the workflow from *their* seat: every place they have to write something twice, calculate something in their head, or go find someone is a place the offer dies.

Week four — introduce the scorecard. Now the ask is fair. Publish the weights, explain the composite, run the first scoring cycle, and start the spot rewards for asking. Announce the team weekly goal at the same time so it launches with social momentum.

Ongoing — measure, publish, re-weight. Review the composite monthly. Re-weight at season changes and tell the team why. Watch for one specific failure mode: an associate gaming the quote count by "offering" catering as a mumbled afterthought to every customer. If quote counts spike while close rate collapses, your weights are wrong — add the close side back in.

What changes downstream once catering actually sells

Owners underestimate the second-order effects, and the ones who get blindsided are the ones who abandon the program after a rough first month.

Prep and purchasing shift. Catering demand is lumpy and forecastable in a way counter traffic isn't — you know Thursday's order on Tuesday. That's a purchasing advantage, but only if orders are entered somewhere the kitchen sees before the morning of. If associates are booking trays on sticky notes, you'll blow through your bread par on a Thursday and short the lunch line. Build the order-visibility step into the same rollout, not after.

Labor scheduling gets more complex. A tray order landing at 11:40 during the rush is a staffing problem, not a sales problem, and staff know it — that's a real reason they avoid selling. Solve it structurally: build trays before the rush wherever the food allows, set pickup windows outside 11:30–1:00 as the default when you take the order, and schedule an extra pair of hands on your heaviest catering days once volume justifies it.

Cash flow and deposits. Deposit-secured events sit on the scorecard for a reason. A tray order taken without a deposit is a promise, and no-shows on large orders are expensive in wasted food. Teach the deposit ask as part of the close, not as a separate awkward conversation: "I'll take a card to hold it, and you'll settle the rest at pickup."

Repeat-account gravity. The first small tray for an office is worth far more than its ticket, because offices reorder. Once volume builds, a simple callback list — every catering customer from the last ninety days, contacted before a known busy season — outperforms almost anything you can do at the counter. That's the point where a dedicated catering lead starts paying for itself, and where the counter staff's job shifts from originating orders to originating *accounts*.

The same pattern, other counters. If you also run a butcher case, a bakery, or a hot bar, the identical structure transfers with different KPIs — custom cake consultations, holiday roast pre-orders, hot-bar family packs. Build the scorecard once and swap the six outcomes. The mechanism, not the menu, is what generalizes.

Related questions

How long before I see results from a catering incentive?

Expect four to eight weeks. The first two weeks produce more asks than orders, which looks like failure but is the leading indicator. Track quote count first; order count lags it by roughly a full sales cycle for group buyers, who typically plan a week or more ahead.

Should part-time staff be included in the scorecard?

Yes, with adjusted expectations. Score them on the same six outcomes but compare per-shift rather than per-month, otherwise full-timers win every contest by volume alone. Excluding part-timers teaches them catering isn't their job, which is the exact belief you're trying to remove.

What if one associate books nearly all the catering?

Good — that's your catering lead. Give them a larger cut and ownership of quoting and follow-up, but keep the opening question on everyone's scorecard. If the whole book runs through one person, you have a single point of failure and no bench when they take a week off.

Does a commission make staff sound pushy to customers?

Only when the incentive rewards closes exclusively. Pay for the ask as well as the close and the pressure drops, because the associate has no reason to push a customer who already said no. A scripted, one-line question is not pushy; a cornered employee chasing a bonus is.

Do I need software to run a weighted scorecard?

Not for a single location. A spreadsheet and a clipboard handle eight associates fine. Buy a sales-performance or incentive-comp platform when the time you spend pulling data and calculating payouts exceeds what the software costs — usually multi-site, not single-counter.

FAQ

Why won't my deli staff just ask customers if they want catering?

Because nothing rewards it and several things punish it. If pay and praise are tied to counter speed and order accuracy, every catering conversation is a measurable hit to their score and an unmeasured favor to you. Change the scorecard so catering appears on it, give them a one-line script and a price sheet, and the ask stops costing them anything.

Do I need to hire a separate catering salesperson?

Usually not at first. Most delis do better naming one or two existing associates as catering leads with a larger cut and ownership of quotes and follow-up. A dedicated hire makes sense once catering volume is steady enough that the salary is covered by growth you can already see — before that, it mostly teaches the counter that catering isn't their job.

How much should the incentive be?

Run it against your own average catering ticket and margin rather than copying a number. A flat per-order amount is simpler for staff to grasp and for you to forecast; a percentage tracks better on large tickets. Start conservative, measure for a month, and raise it if response is flat — raising an incentive is easy, cutting one is not.

What if my staff says they're too busy to sell catering?

Take it seriously — it's usually true and usually a process problem. Audit how long a catering order actually takes them: notepad plus re-entry plus manager approval can be five minutes during a rush. Shorten it to a checkbox form and a one-tap POS button, default pickup windows outside the rush, and reward the ask itself. "Too busy" becomes "worth ten seconds."

Should I run a contest or a permanent bonus structure?

Permanent wins long-term. Contests spike effort and then fade to baseline, sometimes below it. Use a short contest — one or two weeks — as a launch event for a permanent change, never as a replacement for one. The habit you want is an associate asking every plausible group buyer, every shift, in February as reliably as in December.

How do I track who sold what without adding admin work?

A paper log at the register with initials, customer name, and order size takes seconds per entry and under ten minutes a week to total. A free web form on a tablet works equally well. The only rule that matters: never build a tracking step that requires the associate to leave the counter, because it will be abandoned within a week and your data will be worthless.

Sources

• https://restaurant.org/ — National Restaurant Association, industry research on foodservice operations and off-premises dining
• https://www.sba.gov/business-guide/manage-your-business/hire-manage-employees — U.S. Small Business Administration guidance on hiring, managing, and compensating employees
• https://hbr.org/topic/subject/compensation — Harvard Business Review coverage of compensation design and employee motivation
• https://pos.toasttab.com/blog — Toast restaurant operations blog, practical guidance on catering programs and staff training
• https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/flsa — U.S. Department of Labor, Fair Labor Standards Act guidance relevant to bonuses and overtime calculation
• https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/topics/compensation — SHRM resources on incentive pay and variable compensation structures
• https://www.foodservicedirector.com/ — FoodService Director, operator-level coverage of deli, catering, and foodservice management
• https://www.irs.gov/businesses/small-businesses-self-employed — IRS small business guidance on employee bonuses and payroll treatment

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