UK meeting catering grew 14% in 2024. Sodexo reported 22% growth in the same segment globally. Hospitality is outpacing the wider contract catering market, and for many operators it has quietly become the difference between a flat P&L and a healthy one.

What hasn't kept up is how most caterers actually run it. Backstage, hospitality still moves through inboxes, spreadsheets, phone calls, and the occasional sheet of paper. In this Served. episode, Toby Bonnett (VP of Product at Kanpla), Maximilian Bangen (Lead Product Manager at Kanpla), and Jacob Willemsen (Account Director at Genuine Dining) unpack the shift driving meeting catering's growth, the operational mess sitting underneath it, and what four years of compounding hospitality growth looks like inside a real B&I operation.

Hospitality is no longer a side dish.

Daily desk work no longer happens in the office. Collaboration does. Events do. Food does. Only 68% of employees come into the office to collaborate with their coworkers, and they cluster around the middle of the week. 85% of occupants now expect events, food experiences, and service from their workplace.

That's the underlying shift: offices have become venues, not desks. Staff dining and canteen footfall still haven't recovered to pre-pandemic levels. Meeting catering is doing the opposite.

Kanpla's own Behind the Numbers research, published in April 2025, found that the top four caterers averaged 9.75% growth in FY24, almost double the 5.3% wider market average. The growth isn't sitting in the canteen line. As Toby put it in the webinar,

"Hospitality is no longer a side dish. It's a key part of your P&L, and it's critical to your client relationships."

Capture rate has been the headline metric of contract catering conversations for the past three years. The more interesting metric in 2026 is the hospitality line on the P&L, and how fast it's growing relative to everything else on the contract.

The hidden cost of running hospitality on email

Speak to any operator running hospitality today and you'll hear the same description of the workflow. A booker emails a request. The administrator forwards it to the chef. The chef has a question. The administrator chases the booker. The booker forwards it back. Someone updates a spreadsheet. Someone else opens a different version of the spreadsheet. A phone call is made to confirm. Payment reconciliation happens at the back of an Excel file. A printed sheet ends up on the kitchen pass.

Toby described the texture of it in the webinar:

"Hundreds of emails, pen, paper, phone calls, spreadsheets, back and forth, outdated web shops that never really work, leading to slow approvals for orders, missing quotes, and ultimately frustrated chefs, and the worst thing of all, an anxious booker."

The cost of this is not abstract. It's quotes that never close because the chase took too long. It's last-minute bookings that get declined because no one is sure if there's capacity. It's the upsell that doesn't happen because the menu detail isn't visible. It's the bespoke event that turns into a four-day email thread. It's leakage, dressed up as standard operating procedure.

Hospitality is the most under-tooled part of most catering operations. Canteens have apps, POS systems, loyalty programmes, and dashboards. Meeting catering, in many operations, has Outlook.

One workflow, three people

The Kanpla Hospitality Solution is built around three stakeholders that every operator already knows: the booker, the operator, and the chef. Each owns something different. The booker carries the weight of getting the event right before it begins. The operator owns the P&L and the client relationship. The chef owns the plate. The problem isn't that any of them lacks skill. It's that the systems sitting between them create friction at every handoff.

The webinar walked through three demos, one for each stakeholder. Here's what stands out in each, and why it matters for an industry where the margin in hospitality is increasingly where the growth is.

Demo 1: The booker, calm by design

The booker is the most overlooked stakeholder in the hospitality workflow. They're rarely a hospitality professional. They're an executive assistant, a team lead, or a workplace manager organising a board lunch. They carry the anxiety from the moment they hit "book" until the food arrives.

The new booking experience is built to take that anxiety out. Slot-based delivery, style-aware menu recommendations, draft orders, integrated room bookings, managerial approvals, and a bespoke quote workflow that replaces the 40-message email chain.

"We believe this leads to less leakage. This means that your catering operation is the first choice, not the last resort."

The full feature breakdown sits on the Kanpla Hospitality Solution page.

Demo 2: The operator, one source of truth

The operator's day is reactive. Emails, phone calls, change requests, a chef walking in to confirm something that was confirmed yesterday and changed this morning. The operator owns the P&L but rarely has a clean view of it in real time.

The new operator surface pulls all of that into one place: pending orders, approvals and change requests, a weekly view for daily planning meetings, and analytics on revenue and menu performance.

The operator doesn't need a more powerful spreadsheet. They need fewer of them.

Demo 3: The chef, production sheets instead of chasing chefs

The chef wants to do chef work. What they get instead, in most operations, is a constant low-grade interruption to clarify what was actually booked, what changed, and whether they should prep for ten or twelve.

The chef view shares the same source of truth as the operator. From there: print a delivery sheet for any single order, pull a total production list for the day across every event, or have it auto-emailed at 6am.

Max put it cleanly:

"Chefs want to do chef's work. Having a simple tool available to them makes it easy for them to focus on what they really want to do, put great food on people's plates."

The Genuine Dining test: from ~£300K to ~£800K in four years

The strongest case for any operational tool isn't the demo. It's whether the numbers move when you put it into a real business.

Jacob from Genuine Dining, who oversees the Fora account (Fora operates around 70 flexible workspace locations across London), has been working with Kanpla on hospitality for four years. Before Kanpla, his team was running events, pop-ups, and meeting catering across all those buildings on the same combination most operators recognise: emails, phone calls, Excel files, payment reconciliation done from the back of a spreadsheet.

"We just hit a ceiling," Jacob said. "We weren't able to grow."

After moving hospitality onto Kanpla, the trajectory changed. As Jacob put it:

"We were just about hitting a little bit shy of 300,000 pounds a year in hospitality sales. Now four years later, we're hitting about three quarters of a million, 800,000. And that's just on hospitality. Imagine doing all of that still manually. That would have been impossible."

The full Genuine Dining x Fora story (including the +20 hours per week the team has saved on administration) is in the CaterStory on our website The headline isn't the percentage. It's that Jacob is unambiguous about which direction the relationship between the system and the growth runs.

Hospitality Catering - the new P&L driver in Contract Catering

Three things are happening in the contract catering market at once, and most operators are only fully reckoning with one of them.

Hospitality is growing fast. Capture rate on staff dining is, in most B&I operations, flat or declining. Tenders are increasingly weighted by what a caterer can do beyond the canteen, including the meeting catering offer, the technology stack, and the data they can give back to the client. Hospitality sits at the intersection of all three.

Running hospitality on email is not just slow. It is structurally hostile to growth. Every additional booking adds linear administrative load. Every additional client adds another set of preferences to remember manually. Every change request is another email. There's a ceiling to how big the operation can get before the labour cost of running it eats the margin it generates. Jacob's "we just hit a ceiling" wasn't a metaphor.

The operators who are pulling ahead on hospitality are the ones treating it like a real product line: with a system behind it, a workflow that doesn't depend on heroic acts of administration, and visibility into what's actually performing. The ones who aren't will find their hospitality numbers grow until the day they don't, and won't be able to explain why.

The systems enable the people. The people create the magic. Hospitality has stopped being a side dish. The tools, finally, are catching up.

Want to see the full webinar?

Toby and Max walked through the market shift, the full product, and all three demos live. You can watch the whole session here.

Want to see the new Hospitality Solution in your operation? Book a demo. For more on how operators are running hospitality, dining, and loyalty inside one ecosystem, browse the cater stories or read the rest of Served.