Zayos for Aurora restaurants, catering included.

Zayos gives Aurora, Colorado restaurants commission free online ordering on their own branded site. The restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and tips, and pays a flat $499 to $699 per location each month. Zayos is a Fort Lauderdale company. It has no Colorado locations.

No card required. About a minute to run.

Who is actually ordering lunch in Aurora on a Tuesday?

Not a tourist. Aurora is the third largest city in Colorado and it runs on a weekday daytime economy that most delivery apps handle badly. The Anschutz Medical Campus at Fitzsimons puts a hospital, research and university workforce in the tens of thousands inside one square of the city, with shift changes that do not line up with a normal dinner rush. Buckley Space Force Base sits east of it. Add the county offices, the schools and the light industrial belt along Tower Road and you get a city whose biggest ordering hour is often 11:40 in the morning.

Daytime volume behaves differently from dinner. It repeats, it is scheduled, and it arrives in groups. Somebody in a department orders for eleven people, then does it again in two weeks. That customer is worth more than any single delivery app impression, and losing the ability to email her is worse than losing the commission on one order.

A group lunch customer who orders twice a month is worth more than the marketplace impression that found her, which is why the ability to contact her directly matters more than the commission on any single ticket.

What does a percentage cost me on one catering order?

Here is a single realistic Anschutz area drop, priced both ways. Everything in the table is an input you can change.

One 40 person catering order priced on a marketplace and on Zayos
Line Marketplace Zayos
Order 40 box lunches at $18 40 box lunches at $18
Order total $720 $720
Charged to the restaurant 25% commission, $180 $0
Charged to the customer service and delivery fees on top 10% catering fee, $72
Restaurant keeps $540 $720

A 25% marketplace commission on a $720 catering order is $180. On Zayos the diner pays a 10% catering fee and the restaurant is charged nothing, so the kitchen keeps the full $720.

Repeat that twice a month and the difference is $4,320 a year from one account, against a $499 monthly plan that also covers every other order you take.

What makes Havana Street different from anything in Denver?

Aurora is the most internationally mixed city in Colorado, and Havana Street is where you taste it. The stretch the city markets as the Aurora International District carries Korean, Ethiopian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Salvadoran, Somali, Nepali and Russian kitchens inside a few miles, much of it in strip centers with rents that would be impossible on the other side of I 225. Aurora Public Schools serve families speaking well over a hundred languages, and the restaurant corridor reflects that exactly.

Delivery apps are poor at this. Their taxonomies were built for a handful of broad categories, so a Nepali momo house and an Ethiopian kitchen and a Salvadoran pupuseria all get compressed into whatever tag is closest. Your own site has no such limit. You name the dish, you explain it once, and the search engine reads your words rather than a category label.

Havana Street
Aurora International District
East Colfax
Original Aurora
Anschutz / Fitzsimons
Aurora City Center
Southlands
Del Mar
Iliff Avenue
Mississippi Avenue
Buckley Road
Tower Road

Plus Centennial, Parker, Greenwood Village, Commerce City and the surrounding Arapahoe and Adams county communities.

How does an Aurora restaurant go live on Zayos?

  1. 01

    We build your menu once, from what you already have

    Send a PDF, a photo of the board, or your current marketplace listing. We turn it into a structured menu with modifiers, prep times and item level tax treatment. You approve it before anything goes live. There is no setup fee for this.

  2. 02

    Your branded ordering site goes up on your own domain

    Not a page on our marketplace. Your name, your photos, your colors, your domain, indexed under Aurora and your corridor rather than under a delivery zone. The customer record belongs to you from the first order.

  3. 03

    Every channel lands on one kitchen tablet

    On the $599 tier, Otter, the order aggregation service, pulls DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets onto the same screen as your direct orders. The line learns one device instead of four. Most operators are live in under two weeks and take a first direct order within a week of signing up.

Can I run a second brand out of the same Aurora kitchen?

Yes. Concierge is $699 per location per month and includes up to five virtual brands per kitchen. A virtual brand is a separate ordering identity with its own name, menu and page, cooked on your existing line by your existing crew under your existing lease.

For a Havana corridor operator this is the cheapest experiment available. A Korean kitchen can put a fried chicken brand on the same fryers. A Mexican restaurant can run a breakfast burrito concept that only exists between six and eleven. If it does not work you retire the brand and keep the lease. Every brand still lands on one kitchen tablet, and it is still one plan for that location.

Virtual brands and ghost kitchens →

What does Zayos cost in Aurora?

Operator $499, Operator plus Marketplace $599, Concierge $699. Per location, per month, no setup fee, month to month, no contract. Identical in Aurora, in Fort Lauderdale and everywhere else.

Diner paid service fee at checkout: $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine in, 10% catering. The restaurant is never charged a commission and keeps 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips.

Full pricing breakdown →

Aurora operator questions

Is Zayos operating in Aurora today?
No. Zayos is a Fort Lauderdale, Florida company with no Colorado office and no Colorado restaurants on the platform. The only Zayos restaurant taking orders anywhere is Naya Grill, a Lebanese fast casual brand in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, which keeps $48k or more a year on the commission model run at 3,000 orders a month. Aurora operators are served remotely from Florida, which is how onboarding, menu build, training and support work for every restaurant we run.
Why does catering matter so much for an Aurora restaurant?
Because Aurora has an unusual amount of it. The Anschutz Medical Campus at Fitzsimons carries a hospital and research workforce in the tens of thousands, Buckley Space Force Base sits on the east side, and the city has a heavy weekday office and civic footprint. Those are group orders, not single entrees. A 25% marketplace commission on a $720 box lunch drop is $180, which is more than most kitchens make on the whole order. On Zayos the diner pays a 10% catering fee and the restaurant is charged nothing.
My menu is not in English first. Does that break anything?
No. The Havana Street corridor runs Korean, Ethiopian, Mexican, Vietnamese, Salvadoran, Somali, Nepali and Russian kitchens, and dish names in those cuisines rarely survive a marketplace category tag. On your own site you write the dish name as your community writes it, add a plain English line underneath for the neighbor trying it for the first time, and keep your own photograph. Nothing gets renamed by an algorithm that has never eaten your food.
Can I run a second concept out of my existing Aurora kitchen?
Yes, on Concierge at $699 per location per month, which includes up to five virtual brands per kitchen. A virtual brand is a separate ordering identity, its own name and menu, cooked on the same line by the same crew under one lease. It is a common way for a corridor kitchen to test a second cuisine without signing another five year lease on Havana or Iliff.
Do I have to cancel DoorDash and Uber Eats?
No, and we would not advise it. Marketplaces are useful for the diner who has never heard of you. What they are not worth is a percentage of the regular who orders from you every Thursday. Keep the apps for strangers, move the regulars to your own site, and on the $599 tier run both through one kitchen tablet via Otter so the line never sees the difference.
How is Aurora priced differently from Denver?
It is not. Pricing is per location and identical everywhere: $499 Operator, $599 Operator plus Marketplace, $699 Concierge, per location per month, no setup fee, month to month. An operator with a Havana Street restaurant and a Southlands second location pays for two locations, and either one can start or stop on its own.
Who pays the fee on a normal, non catering order?
The diner, and it is flat rather than a percentage. $0.99 on pickup, $2.99 on delivery, $0 on dine in. The restaurant pays no commission at all and keeps 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips. There is no hidden percentage anywhere in the Zayos model. That is the entire product.
What if my volume is seasonal or my staffing is thin right now?
Flat pricing behaves well under both. A percentage bill grows with every good month, so a strong summer costs you more in commission than a slow one. A flat plan does not move. And because there is no contract and no setup fee, an Aurora operator who wants to test one location for a quarter can do exactly that without committing the other one.

Put a number on your own Aurora leak

The free report reads your restaurant the way a search engine and a delivery app read it, then shows what the percentage is costing you. No card, about a minute, and the report is yours either way.