How ASKZO submits a catering quote in under 3 minutes

The problem with catering quotes

Catering requests don't arrive at convenient times. They come in at 11pm, on weekends, during a Saturday dinner rush. The average response time for a catering inquiry across the industry is 18 hours. The restaurant that responds first — with a complete, professional quote — wins the booking at a dramatically higher rate.

ASKZO was built to make that response time zero. Not fast. Zero.

What a catering request contains

When a customer posts a catering request through Runzo, they provide: event date, guest count, cuisine preferences, dietary restrictions, budget, and delivery details. That's the input. The output needs to be: a specific menu recommendation, tray sizes and quantities for each dish, itemized pricing, a total, and delivery logistics.

Doing that manually takes 15–30 minutes of focused work, assuming the owner is awake and available. ASKZO does it in under 3 minutes.

How ASKZO processes the request

When a catering request matches a restaurant's profile, ASKZO:

1. Reads the event brief — guest count, cuisine type, budget, dietary flags
2. Cross-references the restaurant's catering menu and available tray sizes
3. Calculates the optimal combination of dishes and tray sizes to serve the guest count within budget
4. Checks for dietary conflicts (e.g., not recommending meat-heavy options if vegetarian guests are flagged)
5. Builds the itemized quote with quantities, per-tray pricing, and a total
6. Formats it as a professional catering quote and submits it to the customer

The restaurant receives a notification: "ASKZO submitted a quote for [Event Name]. View it in your dashboard."

Approval mode vs. auto-pilot

Restaurants can run ASKZO in two modes. In approval mode, ASKZO drafts the quote and waits for the owner to review before sending. In auto-pilot mode, it submits immediately and notifies the owner after.

Most restaurants start in approval mode, review a few quotes, realize ASKZO is consistently getting it right, and switch to auto-pilot within the first month.

"I came downstairs Sunday morning, made coffee, and saw three catering quotes already submitted from overnight requests. ASKZO had handled them while I slept. Two of them converted."
— Restaurant owner, Atlanta GA

The compounding effect

The average catering booking is worth $1,200–$8,000 in revenue. A restaurant that responds within 3 minutes instead of 18 hours wins a measurably higher share of those bookings. Over a year, for a busy restaurant, that's tens of thousands of dollars in bookings that would have gone to a competitor who happened to be awake.

ASKZO doesn't just save time. It changes which jobs you win.