How common is it for restaurants to add catering, and what does that market actually look like?

For the second half of that question there's a real, verifiable answer: the U.S. catering-services market is valued at roughly $15.7 billion in 2026 with about 13,658 businesses nationally (IBISWorld), and catering runs meaningfully thicker margins than the dining room it usually sits beside — commonly cited around 7–8%, against a full-service restaurant's own median 2.8% pre-tax margin in 2024. For the first half — how many existing restaurants are actually adding it — the honest answer is that the specific number circulating online right now doesn't hold up, and that's worth knowing before you build a plan around it.

Is it true that "38% of restaurants plan to add catering in 2026"?

A widely-shared statistic says yes, attributing it to the National Restaurant Association. It doesn't check out. The National Restaurant Association's own 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry report — read in full here, all 58+ pages, including the one section literally titled "Opportunities Beyond the Menu" — never states a catering-adoption figure anywhere. That section covers multi-course meal bundles, meal kits, and meal-subscription programs (72–75% of consumers say they'd try these), not catering expansion by operators.

The "38%" figure traces instead to vendor blog posts that cite it "per the NRA" without a page number — and a second, differently-named report exists that the citation may be conflating with the real NRA study: TouchBistro's own 2026 (American) State of Restaurants Report, an industry survey run with The Harris Poll (600+ full-service operators, fielded October 2025) that is a completely separate document from the NRA's State of the Restaurant Industry. Similar names, different publishers, different methodology — and neither this piece nor the vendor blogs repeating the figure could trace it to a page in either PDF. Rather than repeat an unverifiable number, the honest answer is: no authoritative, traceable figure exists yet for what share of independent restaurants are adding catering this year. Anyone who tells you a precise percentage should be able to point to the page it's on.

What does the market actually look like, then?

Here the numbers hold up. IBISWorld puts the Catering Services industry at $15.7 billion in 2026 across roughly 13,658 U.S. businesses. A trade-press report on the same industry, drawing on 2026 transaction data from over 100 restaurant brands and 8,000 locations, found catering growing faster than the broader restaurant industry — projecting roughly 5.3% annual growth through 2032, against about 3% for restaurants generally, with top-performing catering programs posting 10–20% year-over-year sales growth in early 2026. A separate insurance-industry survey of catering-business owners found 48.5% planning to expand operations in 2026, even as 60.2% named rising costs their biggest challenge — growth and cost pressure sitting side by side, same as the rest of food service.

The margin picture is the more useful number for a restaurant owner actually weighing this. The NRA's own 2025 Restaurant Operations Data Abstract, cited in the Association's 2026 report, put full-service restaurants' median pre-tax income at 2.8% of sales in 2024, down from 4% in 2019; limited-service came in at 4%, down from 6%. Catering margins are reported consistently higher across independent industry sources — restaurant-finance explainers from WebstaurantStore, Grubhub, 7shifts, and Altametrics each independently cite a 7–8% range, attributing the gap to lower front-of-house labor and more predictable, planned production than a nightly dining room carries. None of these trace to one single primary study — it's a widely repeated industry rule of thumb, not a government statistic — but four independent sources landing on the same range is a real signal, and the direction (catering runs thicker than dine-in) matches what NRA's own dine-in numbers already show as the pressure point.

So why would an existing restaurant look at catering at all?

The same reason the margin gap exists in the first place: a catering order uses a kitchen a restaurant is already paying rent, insurance, and a cook's wage on, at a moment — an off-peak hour, a slow weekday — the space would otherwise sit at partial capacity. Nothing in the sources here quantifies exactly how much idle capacity the average independent restaurant carries, so that specific number isn't claimed; what's well-supported is the underlying economics: NRA's 2026 report shows full-service dine-in margins compressed to 2.8% under food and labor cost pressure that's climbed 35–40% since 2019, while the same cost base, applied to catering's planned-menu, bulk-prep model, is what independent sources put at roughly double the margin. For an owner already running a kitchen, that's the case in one sentence: the fixed costs are already being paid either way.

What's actually different about doing it well versus doing it badly

The operational risk isn't the food — it's the first response. A corporate-lunch inquiry for 35 people, sent as an Instagram DM on a Saturday night mid-service, competes with every other caterer that answers first. Nothing in the sources reviewed here puts a verified number on how often that first response is slow, so this piece doesn't repeat one; the structural point stands regardless: an inquiry that sits unanswered until Monday has already had its decision made for it. This is the same server-attention scarcity that affects a dining room at 7pm on a Friday, just showing up in a different channel a text or DM instead of a raised hand at table six.

Worth naming honestly: existing tools already answer part of this, from a different angle. Loman and similar AI phone-answering systems will take a catering call, quote pricing, and even process payment over the phone, syncing straight into a POS. That's a real, useful answer to "the phone rang and nobody could get to it." It's also a different product than a text-based page a restaurant can stand up in minutes with no phone integration, no POS sync, and no payment processing at all — the DM-and-bio-link version of the same problem, for the restaurant that hasn't built (or doesn't want) a phone system around this yet.