Fast-casual restaurant chain Cava is leaning heavily into catering as remote workers return to offices and the D.C. restaurant company continues to convert many of its Zoe's Kitchen locations to the Cava brand.
The Mediterranean restaurant group, which owns dozens of Cava stores as well as the Zoe's Kitchen restaurant chain, launched catering Monday with a new facility beneath a brick-and-mortar Cava restaurant near Bryant Park in New York City. It aims to expand catering nationally through 2023, with a site in Tysons slated to become the first hub in Greater Washington early next year.
It’s an effort whose seeds were planted pre-pandemic, with the company’s 2018 acquisition of competing Zoe’s Kitchen, according to Cava CEO Brett Schulman. About 20% of Zoe’s business comes from catering, and the acquisition armed Cava with the expertise and format to offer catering to Cava customers as well, Schulman said.
Catering to put Cava's ample real estate to use
Cava has been trimming the Zoe's portfolio since the buy, as well as converting many of the Zoe's locations into Cavas. There are currently 137 Zoe’s locations, down from 261 when the acquisition closed in 2018. Cava, meanwhile, has gone from 66 locations in 2018 to 153 locations today.
As part of the catering rollout, some of the remaining Zoe's, rather than being converted into Cavas with a dine-in option, will instead become delivery, carryout, and catering kitchen locations without seating, Schulman said.
“We’ve been, actually, having catering requested since our early days, almost a decade ago, but we haven’t really had the capacity in our current restaurants to produce catering because that capacity has really been monopolized by our in-restaurant and our digital ordering guests,” he said of the Cava locations. “When we acquired Zoe’s, we acquired some great catering assets as well as the learnings of what that business was producing, so that helped inform how we wanted to eventually grow our Cava catering channel."
It is hard to quantify the cost of the rollout, Schulman said, in large part because it's happening along with the company's ongoing efforts to convert Zoe's locations into Cava restaurants. In some cases it means repurposing space now used for in-person dining, in others, securing additional space connected to an existing restaurant, like what it did with the New York City launch. It also means planning new Cava locations that have the additional kitchen capacity needed for catering — approximately an extra 500 square feet.
Expanding the catering operation comes as Cava expects to open about 60 new locations over the next year. It aims to grow its existing footprint in places where it already has a presence and branch out into new ones, including Florida and Oklahoma, through a mix of new stores and conversions. All that is aided by a $190 million funding round the company raised in April.
"It’s another way for us to use our real estate and think about it flexibly for our different channel needs, whether thats our physical demand or our e-commerce, digital demand and our off-premises catering channel that we’re starting to build out," Schulman said.
Cava catering to offer expanded menu
Cava isn’t the only restaurant chain to embrace online ordering and at-home dining during the Covid-19 pandemic, a focus driven in no small measure by restrictions in early 2020 prohibiting in-person dining at restaurants. In those early days, Schulman said, the company was more focused on insulating itself from the impact of the pandemic. But as things started to stabilize, Cava stepped up those planning efforts, starting with an experimental, “lab test” of Cava catering from the company’s innovation kitchen in Woodbridge.
It’s there that Cava tests out different potential menu items before rolling them out to other locations, and based on that initial test, the company now plans to offer for catering dishes not available at its existing stores, among them steak and roasted salmon kabobs.
As employers ramp up efforts to bring their remote workers back into the office, Cava hopes to be there to cater their first in-person staff meetings. Ditto for events thrown by say, college sports teams that need to feed a crowd, or a salesperson looking to bring in lunch for a big pitch meeting.
“It’s a lot of our customers that come in to grab a customized bowl or pita that have small or large group settings, whether it’s a welcome back to the office event, which we’re seeing a lot of currently on our Zoe’s side, whether it’s a sports team at a college, whether it’s a family event," Schulman said. "So we see a variety of large and small group occasions, and that’s also allowed us to broaden out our menu and test things in catering that we do not currently offer in our restaurant.”
