Every catering enquiry in India opens the same way. What is your rate per plate. How many people can you do. Are you free on the fourteenth of December.
You answer those three questions several times a day, by voice, while standing next to a hot counter or driving to a venue. Half of the people asking are collecting quotes and will never book. You will not know which half until you have spent twenty minutes each.
A card page cannot book the event for you. It can answer the three questions before the call, so the calls you do take are with people who have already accepted your rate.
Put the menus on the page, not in your head
Catering sells packages, not dishes. The page should show two or three packages the way a customer thinks about them, not a list of two hundred items.
| Standard veg thali | Fixed price per plate, with what is included listed in one line. |
|---|---|
| Wedding package | Starting at, because it moves with counters, staff and city. |
| Corporate lunch | Fixed price per plate, minimum headcount stated. |
| Live counters and speciality | Price on ask, quoted after the menu is settled. |
| Tasting session | Free or a fixed charge. Whichever it is, say which. |
State your minimum headcount on the page. It is the fastest filter you have. A caterer who does not do parties under fifty should never be spending calls on parties of twenty.
Photos of food have to be honest
This is the one trade where a beautiful photo can lose you the client. Families remember what the picture looked like and compare it to what arrived on the table.
- • Photograph a real counter at a real event, not a styled plate.
- • Show the spread, because scale is what a customer is buying.
- • Include the serving staff in uniform. Service quality is half of what people are paying for.
- • One photo of your kitchen or prep area, clean. This answers a question nobody asks out loud.
- • Avoid stock images entirely. Experienced customers recognise them and they cost you trust immediately.
In catering the photograph is a promise. Only photograph what you can put on the table again in December.
Dates are the thing the phone is actually for
You cannot publish your availability, and you should not try. What you can do is make sure the enquiry arrives with the date attached rather than as a bare hello.
A WhatsApp button on your page does that in practice. People type more in a message than they say on a call. An enquiry that opens with fourteenth December, two hundred people, veg only can be answered in one line while you are standing at a venue, and it either becomes a real conversation or it does not, in under a minute.
This is also why the page should carry your booking number and not your personal one. Catering enquiries arrive at strange hours from people who are planning at midnight, and the two things are easier to keep apart when they were never mixed.
Menus, per plate rates and photos of real events on one page you can send in a second.
Put your catering business onlineYour suppliers and staff list is a business asset
A caterer runs on a network. Vegetable suppliers, a paneer man, a tandoor cook you borrow for big events, waiters, tent and furniture people, the venue managers who recommend you.
That list usually lives on a SIM with names like Waiter Raju and Sabzi bhaiya, which is fine until you need eight waiters for a Saturday and cannot remember who worked out well last time.
Bring the phonebook into the app, scan the cards you collect from suppliers, and add one line of note to each. Good tandoor, needs a day notice. Reliable, expensive. Only south Mumbai. Then note where you met each one. When an event lands in a part of the city you rarely work in, that is what you search.
Payments, advances and what it costs
Your UPI QR code can sit on the same page, so an advance can be paid off the screen the customer is already looking at. Ahoyy takes no commission on that money and never sits in the middle of it.
The card, the menu, the photos, the QR code and the contact tools are free. Ahoyy charges only for revealing verified business contacts from the directory at volume, at ₹199 for 25 reveals or ₹299 and ₹799 monthly. A catering business setting up its page pays nothing.
One page, three packages, five honest photos and your minimum headcount. That is an afternoon of work and it will save you a call a day for years.
There is a second reason to have the page ready before the season. Catering enquiries cluster hard around wedding dates and festivals, and in those weeks you are physically at events for fourteen hours a day. The page has to be able to answer for you while your hands are full, because that is exactly when the enquiries arrive.
Set it up in a quiet month. A page written calmly in July reads better than one typed on a phone in a car park in December, and it is the only version of your business a new customer will ever see.
And print the QR code on something that stays behind after the event. The menu card on the buffet table, the box the sweets went home in, the invoice you hand the host. Two hundred people ate your food that evening. Give at least a few of them a way to find you again.