How fast do I need to respond to a catering inquiry to actually book it?

Under five minutes, if you can manage it. Under an hour, always. Every independent study of lead response time — inside catering and out — finds the same shape: the odds of winning the business fall off a cliff in the first hour, and keep falling the longer an inquiry sits. If a catering or event inquiry has been sitting in your inbox or voicemail since yesterday, the honest read of the evidence is that you've probably already lost it to whoever answered first.

How much does response speed actually change whether you win the booking?

The most detailed dataset available for the event-catering world comes from Everybooking, a venue-booking software company that aggregated reply-time and outcome data across more than 1,200 of its customer wedding venues plus matched public benchmarks, published May 3, 2026. It's wedding-venue data, not caterer-specific, but the buying pattern it describes — someone emails several venues or caterers at once and books with whoever makes them feel taken care of first — is the same pattern every independent event-catering business competes inside. Their conversion rate by first-reply speed:

Their finding, in their own words: "each order-of-magnitude reduction in reply time roughly doubles conversion rate." The gap between the fastest and slowest venues in their dataset is stark — the top 10% of venues reply in under 60 seconds and the top 25% in under 8 minutes, while the median venue takes 11 hours and the bottom 25% take over 26 hours to send a first reply at all.

Does this hold up outside weddings — for restaurant catering too?

Yes, on two separate counts.

The general finding is nearly twenty years old and still the most-cited number in B2B sales research. A 2007 study by James Oldroyd (then at MIT Sloan) and Dave Elkington of InsideSales.com analyzed more than 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts across six companies and found that a company's odds of making contact with a lead fall by roughly 100 times, and its odds of qualifying that lead fall by roughly 21 times, when it waits 30 minutes to call instead of 5. Even within the first hour alone, the odds of making contact drop more than tenfold. The study popularized in Harvard Business Review as "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (Oldroyd, McElheran & Elkington, March 2011) isn't wedding- or restaurant-specific — it's leads in general, across industries — but it's the underlying reason speed-to-lead is treated as gospel everywhere it's been measured, catering included.

The catering-specific evidence is thinner, but it points the same direction. The International Caterers Association's 2023 industry survey of 72+ catering companies (spanning $250k to over $10m in annual sales, published via Catersource in March 2024) doesn't publish its own response-time-to-close numbers, but its advice is blunt: "the faster you respond, the more likely you are to win the business," and it recommends caterers set up a process to respond to leads in under five minutes — independently landing on the same number the 2007 MIT/InsideSales.com research found, in a different industry, sixteen years earlier.

A word on numbers we chose not to use. You'll see more dramatic figures repeated across catering-marketing blogs — a "42-hour average response time," a "4.2-hour average," "78% of customers book with the first vendor that responds." We looked for the studies behind each one. The 42-hour figure is presented by its own publisher as uncited, calling it simply "the most-cited number in sales." The 4.2-hour figure, and a cluster of others alongside it (a 60% prospect-loss rate at 2 hours, a 58% phone-inquiry tracking rate, an 82%-of-quotes-get-one-follow-up rate), are attributed by one vendor blog to a "Tripleseat 2025 Event Sales Benchmark," a "Hospitality Technology 2025 restaurant operations survey," "CaterZen 2025 sales data," and "SevenRooms 2025 data" — and none of those four named reports could be located published anywhere, including on the companies' own sites. Separately, a widely shared "couples who hear back within 5 minutes are 21× more likely to book" claim turns out to be the identical 21× figure from the 2007 MIT/InsideSales.com study above, relabeled as wedding-specific and attributed to a different company entirely. None of these are used in this article — not because they're necessarily false, but because we couldn't verify them, and a plausible-sounding invented number is still an invented number.

Why are independent caterers and restaurants slow to answer in the first place?

Not for lack of caring — for lack of hands. The ICA survey above found 86% of catering companies understaffed heading into 2024, worst in operations (front-of-house and event planning staff) and culinary. Curate's 2026 Catering Industry Trends report, published February 3, 2026, found the identical 86% understaffing figure holding steady two years later, alongside 98% of operators naming labor costs a major concern — a repeat finding, not a one-off. When the same one or two people are running service, prepping food, and checking a shared inbox, an event inquiry that lands mid-shift is competing with everything else that's on fire that hour. It isn't a low priority — it's just rarely the loudest thing in the room at the moment it arrives, and by the time it is, the couple or the office manager has usually already heard back from someone else.

What should you actually do if five minutes isn't realistic?

Treat the first reply and the real quote as two different jobs, sent at two different speeds.

The first reply's only job is to be fast and human: confirm you got the inquiry, say when they'll hear real numbers from you, and ask the one detail you actually need to price it (date, headcount, or budget — pick the one that matters most for your kitchen). That message can go out in under five minutes even from a phone between tickets, and per the tables above, it's the single highest-leverage thing you can do — it doesn't need to contain a menu or a price to capture most of the conversion benefit of speed.

The full proposal is allowed to take longer, because it should — pricing a 150-person office lunch or a wedding menu properly takes real time, and a rushed, wrong quote costs more than a slow, right one.

A few concrete ways independent operators close the gap between those two speeds without adding staff: route every catering/event channel (the contact form, the catering email address, the phone line) to one inbox one person checks constantly during service, not three separate places nobody owns; turn on voicemail transcription so a phone inquiry left during dinner rush reads like a text instead of waiting for someone to have five free minutes to listen to it; and keep two or three short, personal-sounding template replies ready so "I got this, more details by tomorrow morning" takes ten seconds to send instead of ten minutes to compose from scratch.

Where Brief First fits

None of this requires new software — a phone that actually gets answered, one inbox with one clear owner, and a habit of replying within the hour will get most of an independent operator most of the way up that Everybooking table. That last part is what our own product does, for what it's worth. Brief First's free floor already gives every guest — including someone asking about a wedding or an office lunch — a place to leave that enquiry any hour of the day, and it lands on your screen exactly as written, at no cost, no matter how many arrive; that part never costs anything, at any volume. Where the paid host (plans start at $30 a month) changes the picture is what happens the moment that enquiry lands: instead of a half-caught note waiting for someone to notice it, the host has already asked the couple of questions that make it call-ready — the occasion, the headcount, the date, a number to call back — so a five-minute reply can be a real callback with real details, not just "thanks, we got your message." It's an AI host doing that gathering, plainly — not a trick, and not a reason to buy on its own — and it never books, prices, or confirms anything itself; a person still calls back and closes the deal. Whether you use us or a shared inbox and a fast habit, the fastest path to more catering bookings is the same one: somebody has to see the message and act on it before the next place does.