Pancake Party at the Office? Popular Chains Are Cashing In on Catering.

One morning this month, 40-odd employees of PFG Customized, one of the largest food-service distributors in America, gathered from around the country at the company’s corporate headquarters in Lebanon, Tennessee, for a daylong meeting. Almost immediately, Tabitha Shaler, an account manager, raised a key issue of the day: “What are we having for lunch?”

“Let’s do Cracker Barrel” was the nearly unanimous reply, Shaler said.

At lunchtime, the boardroom table became a smorgasbord of fried chicken, cornbread and macaroni and cheese -- a kind of midday Southern cookout in the midst of a corporate office.

“It’s so easy to order it in, because they bring it right to us in their cute little van,” Shaler said. “But it’s also just good, enjoyable food. It wasn’t just sandwiches or the boring stuff you sometimes get when you’re getting catering.”

Off-site dining now represents more than one-fifth of Cracker Barrel’s business, and it’s growing. The company is serving up trays of fried chicken, biscuits, macaroni and cheese and more to offices, family events and community gatherings across the country, staking an aggressive claim on territory that has more traditionally been occupied by takeaway and fast-casual brands like Subway and Starbucks.

Several other chain restaurants best-known for their dine-in experience, like Red Lobster, Olive Garden and Texas Roadhouse, are also courting the catering market, viewing large-scale orders as an untapped source of revenue. Across 165 top restaurant chains in the United States, 9% of orders in 2025 were identified as large-group, off-site orders, according to Robert Byrne, the senior director of consumer research at Technomic, a research and consulting firm for the food industry.

When Doug Hisel began working at Cracker Barrel in 2007, the company offered delivery and catering services, but only as a kind of afterthought. It had no systems or procedures in place for what the restaurant industry calls “off-site dining,” which represented a vanishingly small percentage of the company’s bottom line. Virtually the only meals prepared to go were Thanksgiving specials.

“If you wanted turkey and dressing and some sides, we could swing it,” Hisel, now a senior vice president at the company, said. “It was nothing like it is today.”

One of the biggest players has been IHOP, which has sought to make its pancakes and French toast staples of corporate break rooms and church functions. The breakfast chain, a subsidiary of Dine Brands, has invested significantly in its catering service since 2024, creating an online ordering platform, adopting specialized packaging to keep delivery orders warm, and providing its franchise owners with training programs that encourage sales outreach in their communities. As a result, the company says, 10% of its business now comes from catering orders -- a boon at a time when casual dining chains are facing falling sales and closing restaurants.

Noah Glass is the founder of the online catering platform Olo, a digital ordering platform used by IHOP and Cracker Barrel. “Workplace catering really had a moment coming out of COVID, as part of the whole return-to-office movement,” he said. The return to normality had “a slingshot effect” on the casual dining industry that created a catering boom, Glass said.

The risk inherent in all off-site dining is quality control. Orders arriving lukewarm or missing items are the bugbears of the takeout business, and in catering the problem is magnified by the scale of the orders.

Samantha Strong, executive director of brand calendar strategy for IHOP, said the chain’s catering orders average about nine times the size of its dine-in checks. And while such sizable orders are a potential gold mine for franchises, she said, they are also a potential minefield -- particularly with the kinds of dishes that places like IHOP and Cracker Barrel specialize in, which don’t typically travel as well as delivery standards like pizza or Chinese food.

When Hisel recently helped deliver a catering order to a high school soccer tournament in Hendersonville, North Carolina, he was well aware of how much was riding on the opportunity.

If he could provide young soccer players and their families Southern-style comfort food of the same quality they would expect to find in one of the company’s 656 restaurant dining rooms, he might win dozens of new customers -- and perhaps lure back old ones. Any misstep could travel quickly on social media.

“If I’m late, or if the food is bad, I now have 150 people who each have 150 friends on Facebook telling people how bad it was,” Hisel said, with a note of consternation. “It will hurt us way more than it will help. So if we cater, we have to be absolutely dialed in on execution.”

Hisel said it took Cracker Barrel several years to iron out the kinks in its catering service and get the deliveries up to snuff. One of its earliest investments was a fleet of vans to deliver large orders in key markets. “One of the reasons we got the vans was so that we could get the orders there on time,” Hisel said. “Asking a general manager to pack things up in their personal cars and deliver them -- we just couldn’t execute against that.”

The company also invested in proprietary technology for “mobile hot boxes,” and hired regional catering managers who could handle logistics and oversee quality control.

For consumers, part of the appeal of these services is surely the novelty -- sausage biscuits and pancakes are a change of pace from the usual bagels and muffins -- and it’s hard to say whether the trend will continue once that novelty wears off.

For the time being, the brands are happy to capitalize on it. Nostalgic for an IHOP breakfast? Your heart might leap to see it on the conference table.

Hisel’s own family is not immune. “My daughter is getting married in June,” he said. “Every catering specialist in the world was trying to sell us something, and I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is going to cost me a hundred thousand dollars.’” Then his daughter and her fiance had breakfast at Cracker Barrel. “He had the steak tips, and he was like, ‘Why don’t we get Cracker Barrel to cater?’”

Hisel, of course, loved the idea. “I was like, ‘Yes, please!’”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright 2026 The New York Times Company

This story was originally published April 28, 2026 at 8:55 AM.