Corporate Catering Orders: One Delivery Link for Each Client Company

MenuForma2026-11-13

Anyone who delivers lunch to offices knows the morning routine. One company phones its order through, another posts a list in a group chat, an office manager e-mails a spreadsheet at 10:40, and someone texts an extra sandwich after the van has left. Corporate catering orders come in from everywhere at once, and by noon nobody is completely sure which bag belongs to which building.

This guide shows a calmer way to run it in MenuForma. You keep one delivery menu for the whole kitchen, give every client company, office building or site its own ordering link and QR code, and each order arrives already labelled with the company it came from. Every employee orders and pays for their own meal, and your team packs by company name instead of by memory.

What a delivery channel is, and what it is not

In MenuForma, a delivery channel is a named version of your delivery link. You create one called “Harbour House” or “Pemberton & Co”, and it gets its own link and QR code. Behind it sits the same delivery menu as always, with the same dishes, sizes, add-ons, photos and allergens, the same delivery zones and fees, and the same payment methods.

What the channel adds is a name on the order. When someone orders through the Harbour House link, “Harbour House” appears on the order card, in the order list, in the order details and on the printed receipt. The employee never sees that name. To them, it is simply your menu.

Be clear about what a channel does not do. It is a label for where an order came from, nothing more: no separate prices, menus, discounts, minimum order, zone or delivery fee per channel, and no fixed address, delivery slot or cut-off time. If a client has negotiated its own price list, channels will not handle that. If all clients order from the same menu at the same prices, they fit well. A building with its own delivery fee is a job for a zone link, covered below.

What you need before you start

The Regular plan. Delivery ordering, the channel QR codes, online payment, promotions and selling hours are all part of it. The plans page shows what each plan includes.
A menu in MenuForma. If you have not built one yet, follow how to create a free online menu first. The delivery menu is that same menu, opened at an address such as menuforma.com/delivery/greenleaf-kitchen, so there is nothing to build twice.
A Stripe account, only if you want employees to pay online. Cash and bank transfer work without one.

On Free Forever you can still look at the guest side first: View Delivery Example opens an example delivery menu, so you can judge what your clients’ staff would see.

Turn on delivery and set the basics

Open Delivery Management in the sidebar. It has four tabs: Settings, Zones, Payment and Customers. Start on Settings.

Switch on Enable Delivery.
Under Delivery Methods, choose Merchant Delivery if your own drivers take the food out, and Store Pickup if some clients send a runner to collect. You can offer both.
In Customer contact fields, decide what to ask for and what is required. For office work, Ask for delivery address is essential, because the driver needs the street and the building. Ask for customer name and Ask for phone number help the driver in a busy lobby.
Turn on Show cutlery option if you pack cutlery only on request, which saves waste in offices with their own kitchen.
Set Delivery Hours for each weekday, with more than one period a day if you run breakfast and lunch. If the kitchen is overloaded, delivery can be paused temporarily.
Set a Minimum Order Amount only if you need one. Each employee places their own order, so a £25 minimum would block a single lunch; 0 means no minimum.
Add a Packaging Fee if your boxes cost you money: none, per order or per item, with category or item overrides and an optional maximum.

Then use Preview to see the menu as a guest does, and Get Link to copy your delivery link. The company links you create later are built on it.

Scheduled orders: let staff order before you open

Office lunch is planned food. People decide in the morning or the evening before, and they want it at 12:30. Switch on Enable Scheduled Orders and employees can choose a delivery time inside your delivery hours, even while you are closed. The menu then says you are closed but taking advance orders.

There is no order deadline setting per company. If you need Harbour House orders in by 10:30 to plan the 12:30 run, agree that deadline with the office manager and print it on the poster. It is an agreement, not a setting, so also agree what happens to a late order: the next run, or a phone call.

Zones and delivery fees for the offices you serve

On the Zones tab you decide where you deliver and what it costs. Pick the mode under Delivery Zone Mode, then use Add Zone for each area:

Manual Zone (Text-based): a named area, such as “City centre” or “Riverside Business Park”, chosen as text.
Map Zone (Draw on map): a radius around your kitchen, drawn on the map.

Each zone has its own Delivery Fee and Estimated Delivery Time, so the business park next door can cost less than the offices across town. Radius-Based Delivery Fees let you charge by distance tiers instead, for example 0-2 km and 2-5 km, and Free Delivery Threshold (optional) makes delivery free above an amount you choose.

A channel has no zone or fee of its own: an order through a channel pays the fee of the zone it is delivered to. A building that needs a fixed zone and fee gets its own zone link, explained below. And the fee applies per order, while in office catering each employee’s lunch is its own order. Keep the fee for your regular office zones modest, or set the threshold near the price of a normal lunch, so nobody pays £4 to move a £9 salad across the road.

Payment: every employee pays for their own lunch

On the Payment tab, choose the Payment Methods you accept:

Cash on Delivery: the driver collects at the door or at reception.
Online Payment: the employee pays by card through Stripe while ordering.
Pay at Store: for orders collected at your counter.
Bank Transfer: the guest sees the Bank payment details you enter.

For card payments, open Payments in the sidebar and press Connect Stripe Account to link your own account through Stripe Connect. The money goes directly to your Stripe account. The employee pays while ordering, and if the payment is cancelled, no order is placed. Online payment is available in the countries Stripe supports.

This is where office catering gets easier. With cash, the driver waits at reception while people look for change. When each employee pays online for their own order, it is settled before the van leaves.

MenuForma takes no commission on Stripe payments, but Stripe processing fees still apply.

One limit to state plainly: every order is paid by the person who places it. MenuForma does not invoice the client company, does not bill companies monthly and has no company account. If a client wants to cover its staff’s lunches, that arrangement sits outside MenuForma.

Create one channel for each client company

This is the part that keeps corporate catering orders apart. Go to QR Codes & Links, open the Delivery tab and find the card Delivery channel QR codes.

Type the name of the company or building, for example “Harbour House”, and press Add channel.
For several at once, use Bulk add. Paste a list takes one name per line, which suits a client list. Numbered range creates numbered names, such as Building 1 to Building 6 on a business park, or Floor 3 to Floor 12 in a tower with a tenant on each floor.
Check the result. Names that already exist are skipped, so pasting a list twice does no harm.

You can create up to 200 channels per restaurant. Names must be unique and up to 100 characters. Pick names drivers recognise at a glance: “Pemberton & Co, 3rd floor” says more on a receipt than a client code.

Use Rename when a client changes its name. Delete channel removes a channel; its printed QR code keeps working as your normal delivery QR code, so a forgotten poster still leads to your menu, but new orders from it arrive without a company name. Past orders keep the channel name.

Hand each company its link and QR code

Each channel has its own link, which is your delivery link with the channel added, and its own QR code. Customize adds your logo, colours and a call to action such as “Order lunch by 10:30”. Download All (ZIP) gives you every channel code in one file, and Print A4 lays them out on A4 sheets.

Give each office manager their pack and suggest where it goes:

a code on the fridge or by the coffee machine in the office kitchen;
an A4 poster by the lift or at reception;
the link on the intranet page about lunch and facilities;
a pinned message in the company’s internal chat or WhatsApp group;
a line in the office manager’s weekly e-mail.

Each company should see only its own code. If Harbour House staff scan the Pemberton poster in a shared lobby, their order carries the wrong name, so keep posters inside each company’s own office.

Zone links: a fixed delivery fee for a building or business park

Channels tell you who ordered. Zone links settle where the order goes and what delivery costs. On the Zones tab, with Delivery Zone Mode set to Manual Zone (Text-based), every active zone in the Delivery Zones list has a Copy Link button. It copies your delivery link with that zone added, such as menuforma.com/delivery/greenleaf-kitchen?zone=12. The number at the end comes from MenuForma, so always take the link from the button instead of typing it.

Whoever opens that link finds the zone already chosen and shown with its delivery fee and estimated time. They cannot switch to another zone, so staff at Riverside Business Park cannot pick the cheaper City centre zone by mistake. They still enter their delivery address, and the zone name appears on the order card, in the order details and on the printed receipt.

A zone link has no QR code of its own. Send it by e-mail or in the company’s internal chat, or put it on the intranet. If you later switch the zone off or delete it, the link opens your delivery menu with the normal zone choice.

Which link to give a client:

A channel link puts the company name on every order, comes with a QR code and can be created in bulk, up to 200. The order pays your normal zone fees.
A zone link fixes the zone, its fee and its time, and shows the zone name on the order. It carries no channel name and has no QR code.

No single link does both, so choose one per client. A zone link also hides nothing: anyone ordering without one, through your general link, main QR code or a channel link, picks from the full zone list and sees every name, fee and time. So use zone links for real places at the fee anyone delivering there would pay, never as a private discount for one client, and name zones after buildings or areas when client names should stay out of sight.

What ordering looks like for an employee

There is nothing to install. The link opens in the browser of a phone or computer.

Open the company link or scan the QR code.
Choose dishes, pick sizes and add-ons, and add them to the cart.
Choose delivery or pickup and, with scheduled orders on, a time under Select Delivery Time.
Fill in the contact details and delivery address. The address is matched to your zones; depending on the zone mode, the person may confirm the location on a map. Someone who came through a zone link finds the zone already chosen, with its fee and time.
Add Order Notes such as “Reception, 4th floor, ask for Sam”, and answer Do you need cutlery? if that option is on.
Choose a Payment Method and press Place Order.

Signing in is optional. With Continue with Google, Continue with Apple or Continue with Email, an employee saves their address and order history, and next time Reorder brings back the same lunch. Anyone else can check out as a guest, without an account.

Receiving corporate catering orders and packing by company

Orders arrive on the Orders page. Each order from a channel shows a badge with Channel and the company name on the order card, in the order list, in the order details and on the printed receipt. Orders placed in a manual zone also show the zone name, so a zone-link order carries the zone name but no Channel badge. The kitchen can work from the Kitchen screen as usual.

At packing time, the badge does the sorting. Print the receipts, group the bags by company and load the van in route order: Harbour House in one crate, Pemberton & Co in the next.

The Customers tab in Delivery Management lists delivery customers who signed in, with their number of orders and last order.

There is no filter, report or export per channel. To know how many lunches a client ordered this month, you would count them from the orders. The channel name is a label on each order, not an analytics tool.

Lunch-only dishes with selling hours

If you sell breakfast and lunch from one kitchen, you do not need two menus. On Regular, the Promotions page lets you set Selling hours per dish, and a rule can apply to the delivery menu. The hot lunch box then appears only between 10:00 and 13:30. Promotions can also run time-based discounts for quieter hours.

An example week with three client companies

Greenleaf Kitchen delivers to Harbour House, a law firm, to Pemberton & Co, a design agency, and to Riverside Business Park, where tenants change often. Its week could look like this:

Monday morning: add “Harbour House” and “Pemberton & Co” with Add channel, and “Riverside Unit 1” to “Riverside Unit 6” with Bulk add and Numbered range.
Monday afternoon: Customize the codes with “Order by 10:30 for 12:30”, use Print A4 for posters and Download All (ZIP) for the office managers.
Monday evening: e-mail each office manager their own code and the agreed deadline. With Enable Scheduled Orders on, Tuesday’s first orders arrive that night.
Tuesday to Friday: at 10:30, open Orders and start cooking; at 11:45, print receipts, sort bags by the Channel badge and load the van company by company.
12:30: the driver hands over each company’s bags. Online payers have already paid; the rest pay cash at reception.
Friday: a new tenant moves into Unit 4, so Rename gives that channel the company’s name.

Questions caterers ask about delivery channels

Can each company have its own prices or menu?

No. A delivery channel is a label that tells you which company an order came from, and every client orders from the same menu at the same prices. A building or business park can have its own delivery fee and time through its own zone and zone link, but anyone ordering without that link can see and choose the zone too, so it is not a private price for one client. If a client needs a separate price list, channels are not the tool for that.

Do employees need an app or an account to order?

No app is needed, because the menu opens in the browser. Signing in with Google, Apple or e-mail is optional and saves the address and order history. Anyone can check out as a guest without an account.

Can the company pay one invoice for all its staff?

No. Each order is paid by the person who places it: online by card, in cash on delivery or by bank transfer, depending on the methods you allow. Bank transfer is a method for a single order, not monthly billing, and MenuForma has no company accounts or client invoices.

How many delivery channels can I create?

Up to 200 per restaurant, each with a unique name of up to 100 characters. That is enough for one per client company, or one per building or floor on a large site.

What happens to a printed QR code if I delete its channel?

It keeps working as your normal delivery QR code, so people who scan it still reach your menu, but their new orders no longer carry a company name. Orders placed before you deleted the channel keep their name.

Can I stop corporate catering orders that arrive after the agreed deadline?

There is no cut-off setting per company. You control your delivery hours and can pause delivery temporarily, but the daily deadline is something you agree with each client and print on the poster.

If you already deliver lunch to offices, most of the setup is typing client names and handing out codes. Create your MenuForma account, add your menu, and move to Regular when you are ready to switch on delivery. If you also serve guests on site, the same menu works as a menu QR code on your tables.