I teased this one in the Top of the Fold, so let me make good on it. With the entire industry suddenly staring at catering after the Uber-ezCater deal, it would have been a meaningful dropping of the ball not to point the Shoutout at Disco Cater. Full disclosure, and you know I always give it to you straight: Disco Cater is a Branded portfolio company, so weigh my enthusiasm accordingly.
But stay with me, b/c this one fits the week like a glove (and if the glove fits, you can’t acquit!).
Start with what it is. Disco Cater is a premium, nationwide restaurant catering marketplace that connects businesses, office managers, and event planners with hand-vetted local restaurants. The operative word is premium. Where the dominant incumbent is sprawling and fast-food-heavy, Disco is curated: quality restaurants, genuinely differentiated menus, and a discovery experience that doesn't feel like filling out a form from 2012.
Please note, I’m NOT remotely throwing any shade on ezCater. Zero, Zip, None!
Why? First, b/c they’ve been an ally to operators and a trailblazer for almost two decades when it comes to corporate-focused catering. Second, when you have a portfolio company that is in “competition” with the number one player in the catering space and they’ve just been acquired by the second-largest player in the US food delivery market, you know your role and sometimes shut your mouth (thanks Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson).
Now here's why my using the Shoutout for Disco Cater fits this week so perfectly.
Remember the warning from the Top of the Fold, the dependency trap, whoever owns the corporate client owns the pricing power? Disco was built as the answer to exactly that. For restaurants, it's $0 commission and $0 monthly fees on first-party orders, at a time when incumbents can take a brutal bite of every ticket. And most important, the operator keeps full ownership of their customer data. You don't rent the introduction and hand away the marriage. You keep it. That isn't a feature tucked in a settings menu. It's the entire philosophy of the platform.
The rest of the toolkit backs it up: deeply customizable multi-menu technology (holiday menus, pop-ups, subscription-style ordering), catering-specific delivery built for the realities of a 50-person drop-off, and onboarding measured in minutes instead of the weeks the big platforms ask of you.
And here's the part that tells me where this is going. Disco is built AI-native, for how people are about to order rather than how they used to. That means AI-powered discovery that can turn "I need to feed 40 people on Thursday" into an actual order, and a platform designed for embedded ordering through the assistants people already live in. When search becomes a conversation, the catering platform that speaks that language is the one that wins.
So yes, Uber just put a $2.3 billion stamp of approval on this category. Respect!
And that rising tide is precisely why there's room at the table for a premium, operator-first platform doing it a different way, one built so the restaurant keeps the quality, the margin, and the customer.
Go see it for yourself at discocater.com. To cater or not to cater? There was never a question.
If you’d like more information on Disco Cater or how you can explore opportunities with this company, please contact me directly.
