Shreyansh Manchanda didn't set out to disrupt the catering industry. He set out to solve a simpler, more urgent problem: restaurants were running on fumes.

After COVID, he watched restaurants lean increasingly on food delivery to stay alive. Commissions were punishing, margins razor-thin. In-person dining hadn't bounced back the way anyone hoped. And the startups circling restaurants weren't offering lifelines. They were offering dashboards.

"Most other startups were pitching restaurants more software — marketing tools, loyalty programs, analytics," Manchanda says. "None of that solved their core problem of not having enough money in hand at the end of the day."

His answer was CaterDash, a platform that connects restaurants with catering demand from offices, tech events, conferences, weddings, and festivals. The logic was straightforward: large, pre-confirmed catering orders offer better operational efficiency, less food waste, and significantly stronger margins than delivery ever could. Restaurants already had the kitchens, the staff, and the fixed costs. Catering would just let them use what they already had, more profitably.

Getting the first customers through the door meant starting small and proving the model fast. Manchanda targeted event organizers, budget-conscious groups with recurring needs, and showed them they could get diverse, high-quality food for roughly the same price as ordering pizza. The value proposition spread quickly.

Today, CaterDash estimates that it caters over 90 per cent of tech events in Vancouver. The client list includes Microsoft, Amazon, RBC, and EY. Revenue has grown 4x, bootstrapped and profitable.

Manchanda credits the dominance to a deliberate choice to stay high-touch. "We realized early that reliability, responsiveness, and consistency matter more than growth hacks," he says. "We ensured every order was executed flawlessly, which created strong word of mouth. Today, the majority of our new business comes through referrals."

The growth also came from refusing to accept a narrow definition of the market. While competitors treated catering as an office lunch problem, Manchanda expanded into tech events, music festivals, weddings, and community gatherings. Offices eventually came to CaterDash on their own, after employees who'd experienced the food at events started recommending it to their office managers.

There's a bigger thesis underneath the growth strategy. Manchanda believes the experience economy is entering a new phase, one where AI automating digital workflows makes in-person connection more valuable, not less. "That's a massive and still underserved catering market," he says, "and we've positioned ourselves early to take full advantage of that shift."

For restaurants, the pitch is an end-to-end solution: customer acquisition, menu optimisation, pricing guidance, order management, logistics, and delivery, all without hiring additional staff or investing in new infrastructure. Customers, meanwhile, get restaurant-quality, cuisine-specific food at prices that can run up to 50 per cent less than traditional caterers, whose overhead gets passed directly to the client.

"Many of our customers come for the pricing, but they stay for the authenticity and quality," Manchanda says. "The food is prepared by chefs who specialise in that cuisine, not from a one-size-fits-all catering menu."

CaterDash has since expanded to Toronto and Calgary and is preparing for a U.S. launch. Internally, the team has invested in automation tools that streamline operations for both staff and restaurant partners, moving toward being operationally scalable without sacrificing the service quality that built the business.

The long game, as Manchanda tells it, is to become the default catering channel for restaurants across North America, the platform that makes catering a restaurant's most profitable revenue stream and every shared meal at an event something worth remembering.

"We believe the future of catering belongs to restaurants," he says, "and that every shared meal at an event should be an authentic food experience, not a generic one."