Whether you run a restaurant, a food truck, or any other catering business, joining an online catering platform is a great idea.
Solutions like ezCater make it convenient for restaurants to accept corporate catering orders and reach new customers. This can greatly increase your restaurant’s reach and visibility while opening up new room for accepting orders and generating revenue.
While ezCater is one of the most popular solutions, it’s not necessarily the best for all restaurants. In this guide, we’ll explore some of the top ezCater alternatives and how your business could use them.
What is ezCater?
ezCater is an online catering marketplace that connects businesses and individuals with local caterers and restaurants in their area. ezCater simplifies the process of ordering food for events, meetings, or gatherings by providing a platform where customers can browse through various catering options, compare prices, menus, and reviews, and place orders online.
The platform offers a wide range of cuisines and catering options, allowing users to find catering solutions that match their exact requirements.
ezCater streamlines the catering process by facilitating ordering, payment, and delivery logistics. This makes it convenient for customers to arrange catering services. It also helps catering businesses reach a larger audience of customers through the online marketplace.
While using an online platform like ezCater is a fantastic catering idea, it isn’t necessarily the best choice for all restaurants. This is because the platform may include features that don’t match your restaurant's operations. Or, because your restaurant might seek catering platforms that can operate at a smaller, more personalized scale.
You must understand all of the different features and abilities of ezCater before becoming a partner. It’s also important to understand what alternative platforms exist that could be more suitable for your business.
Top 8 ezCater Alternatives
If you want to accept online catering orders for your business, then ezCater is one of the most popular ways to do it. However, there are various ezCater alternatives out there that still offer excellent features.
Here are a few other online catering company competitors to consider before joining ezCater.
Fooda
Fooda is an online platform that lets you order food from local restaurants to your workplace. The platform is so much more than just an online food ordering system though - it’s a unique approach to bringing local restaurants directly into office buildings.
Businesses can use Fooda to replace their cafeteria. Local restaurants can partner with the platform, and then offices can order pop-up food experiences from these restaurants. This helps workplaces offer a constantly changing variety of food options while making it easy for local restaurants to access new catering opportunities.
Fooda offers daily menus, rewards, and mobile ordering to make on-demand catering easy. From office lunch delivery to box lunches and event catering, businesses can access a range of different catering services through the platform.
As a restaurant, all you need to do is sign up for a Fooda restaurant partnership and establish a catering menu that you offer. You can then use the platform’s unique POS and data tools to accept and manage catering orders.
Fooda is enormously popular amongst many different companies, which makes it a great way to make your restaurant more visible to people seeking catering ordering.
Eat Club
Eat Club is a food delivery service that specializes in providing customized and curated meals for workplaces. The online cafeteria caters to corporate offices, businesses, and teams by offering a wide range of menu options from local restaurants and caterers.
Eat Club offers an easy online ordering system that makes placing a catering order of any size a simple process.
The service focuses on delivering freshly prepared, high-quality meals directly to workplaces, aiming to make lunchtime more convenient and enjoyable for employees. Ezcater compares to Eat Club with the range of local restaurants on offer and the straightforward online ordering system. The platform covers a wide range of menu items and caters to all dietary restrictions.
One of the great things about Eat Club is how personalized the service is. People can order individual meals, which makes catering at a large scale a far more enjoyable experience. It’s also easy for workplaces to scale their catering orders through Eat Club.
As a restaurant, Eat Club is a fantastic way to reach a large network of workplaces in your area that are looking for caterers. The platform manages deliveries and makes large catering orders convenient - which is an excellent way to expand your revenue possibilities.
Caviar
Caviar is a straightforward food delivery app. Unlike ezCater, Caviar lets users order single items instead of purely focusing on larger-scale catering. However, big catering orders can still be facilitated through the platform.
The platform is pretty simple - restaurants sign up, list their menus, and users order directly from the app. Caviar manages deliveries and logistics, making it easy for restaurants to tap into a new audience of customers.
If your restaurant wants to focus on larger catering orders, then Caviar might not be the best ezCater alternative. However, it is a great way to boost marketing and awareness for your restaurant.
ZeroCater
ZeroCater is a platform that specializes in providing catering services to corporate clients and their workplaces. The convenient online platform offers a curated selection of meals and snacks from local restaurants, chefs, and food vendors, that workplaces can order on-demand.
Restaurant partners can join ZeroCater, list their menus, and accept orders through the platform. Workplaces can easily browse different restaurant options and place customized catering orders at any scale they need.
The great thing about ZeroCater is that the platform offers a range of different catering services. This includes their classic “cloud cafe” catering options, event catering services, buffet catering, boxed meals, or a fully managed solution for easy corporate catering.
All meals ordered through Zerocater can be customized to employees' tastes, and there’s great flexibility on the platform with very low headcount minimums. The platform also utilizes a network of 450+ kitchens, which makes its operations run efficiently.
Forkable
Forkable is an online platform that lets teams order corporate lunches on a large scale. While all of the ezCater alternatives listed here can do this, Forkable is slightly different in the way that the platform can automate catering orders.
With Forkable, workplaces sign up for the platform and list the size of their teams and any specific dietary needs and preferences of their teams. Then the platform can automate the entire lunch order based on these prerefeces. This eliminates the need to scroll through menus and take individual orders from large teams - which can get confusing and time-consuming.
Forkable also allows teams to individually select their meals if more customization is preferred. The platform also makes it easy to scale catering orders to thousands of employees. This includes individually-customized meals for each employee - all of which can be automated.
One of the great things about using Forkable is that workplaces can order from a range of different restaurants at once. The platform can support orders from up to ten different restaurants each day. This is a great way to keep corporate catering exciting.
As a restaurant partner, working with Foprjkable is easy. Simply list your menu and wait for orders to come through. Forkable will take care of deliveries and logistics.
Hoppier
As an ezCater alternative, Hoppier takes a slightly different approach. The platform is not a typical online catering ordering solution. Instead, it’s a kind of gift care service that workplaces can use to make purchases for employees.
Hoppier is designed to offer a range of different workplace incentives, like happy hour drinks, workplace gifts, charity donations, learning allowances, and much more. It’s a great addition to any workplace benefits scheme. Of course, the platform can also include food deliveries.
As a restaurant, you can partner with Hoppier to offer food orders and deliveries through the platform. This can be a great way for businesses to provide remote lunch services. You could also offer large catering orders through Hoppier for bigger corporate catering needs.
Thousands of global organizations use Hoppier, which operates in over 60 countries. This makes the platform a great solution for making your business more visible and reaching new customers looking for workplace meals.
While it’s not a typical replacement for ezCater, it could be a good solution if you’d rather focus on individual ordering instead of large-scale catering. However, restaurants could also partner with Hoppier as well as another online catering platform (like ezCater) to provide a range of different on-demand corporate lunch services.
CaterCow
CaterCow is an online platform that specializes in connecting users with local caterers and food vendors for various events and gatherings. The platform simplifies the process of finding and booking catering services by offering a curated selection of options suitable for different occasions, such as corporate events, parties, weddings, and more.
CaterCow allows users to browse through a diverse range of catering menus and services provided by local vendors, providing details on pricing, menu options, and customer reviews. This makes it easier for individuals and businesses to compare offerings and select the catering option that best fits their specific needs and preferences.
The platform offers various types of catering services, such as buffet-style meals, boxed lunches, themed cuisines, dessert options, and more, depending on the vendors available in a particular area.
By offering a user-friendly interface and access to a variety of local catering options, CaterCow aims to streamline the process of organizing events by simplifying the selection and booking of catering services for different types of gatherings or functions.
CaterCow also offers a fully managed catering solution. Instead of teams having to choose their meals each day, you can put this on autopilot and CaterCow will choose relevant meals based on your team’s preferences. This is all done through a dedicated account manager - which is an excellent feature that other online catering platforms don't offer.
As an alternative to ezCater, CaterCow is a good choice for restaurants that don't only want to focus on corporate catering. The platform is also used for various types of events and individual needs, which makes it a more diverse online catering platform. However, CaterCow does seem to have a smaller reach and user network compared to some other ezCater alternatives.
Cater2.me
Cater2.me is an online platform that provides a range of corporate catering services at the tap of a button. The customized catering solutions are ideal for large corporate offices or distributed teams.
As is the case with most of the other ezCater alternatives, users can log into the platform, choose a local restaurant or caterer, and place their catering orders. The fulfillment of these orders is managed by Cater2.me.
Cater2.me offers a range of tailored catering solutions to teams of all sizes. This includes group ordering, boxed meals, family-style catering, snacks, and pantry orders, as well as home deliveries. Due to the wide range of services on offer, Cater2.me can help restaurants tap into a larger audience of prospective customers seeking a wider range of food delivery options.
Like CaterCow, users get a dedicated account manager who tailors menus to everyone’s tastes. This means teams can automate the ordering processes, saving time and effort.
The platform has an extensive vendor network, consisting of various restaurants, chefs, food trucks, and catering businesses. Once you join the network, accepting and managing orders from Cater2.me is a straightforward process.
Conclusion
While each of these ezCater alternatives does many of the same things, they’re also all unique. Each one offers a different user experience, caters to a slightly different audience, and includes a unique range of available vendors. It’s essential that the platform you choose to partner with matches the unique needs and operational strategy of your business.
If your restaurant hosts events, then you’ll also want to use an event management platform to streamline your operations. Watch a demo with Perfect Venue to see how the platform can enhance the way you run your business.
