◆ Des Moines, Iowa

The bigger the order, the more a percentage takes. Zayos takes none of it.

Quick answer

Zayos gives Des Moines restaurants commission free ordering and catering on their own site. The restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue, the diner pays a 10% catering fee at checkout, and plans are $499 to $699 per location monthly. Zay Revenue Group is a Fort Lauderdale, Florida company.

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What does a $650 office catering order actually pay out?

Two receipts for the same tray order to the same downtown floor. Modeled at a 25% blended marketplace rate, which is where the published 15% to 30% base commission lands once delivery, promoted placement and card processing stack on top.

A $650 catering drop through a marketplace

Order total
$650.00
Blended commission at 25%
-$162.50
Customer contact details you keep
none
Restaurant keeps
$487.50

The same $650 catering drop on Zayos

Order total
$650.00
Commission charged to the restaurant
$0.00
Diner paid catering service fee, 10%
$65.00 paid by the customer
Restaurant keeps
$650.00

One standing $650 order a week is about $8,450 a year in commission at that rate. The Operator plan is $5,988 a year and covers pickup, delivery and dine-in ordering on top. These are modeled numbers with the inputs shown, not a customer result.

Why do catering orders break on a delivery app?

Lead times that are not the same as a burrito

Catering orders need their own cutoff, a 24 or 48 hour notice window and a separate calendar from the dinner rush. A marketplace treats a fifty person tray order like a single entree with a twelve minute prep time.

Headcount driven builders

People order for twenty, not for one. The builder prices by head, scales sides and utensils, and lets an office manager change the count on Thursday without calling the kitchen.

Delivery windows, not delivery ASAP

A drop at 11:45 for a noon meeting is the entire job. Scheduled windows and a per location prep buffer are built into the storefront.

A customer you can call again

Office catering is repeat business by nature. The name, phone, email and full order history of the person who books it every month belongs in your customer book, not in someone else’s app.

Why Des Moines is a large order town

Downtown Des Moines is an insurance and financial services core, and the buildings are stitched together by miles of skywalk. That produces a very particular eating pattern: thousands of office workers who never go outside in January, a weekday lunch rush concentrated into ninety minutes, and a steady rhythm of team lunches, client meetings, training days and floor celebrations that arrive as one big order rather than forty small ones.

A percentage fee is indexed to ticket size, so the orders that matter most to a kitchen are the ones it costs the most to accept.

That is the reason this page is about catering rather than districts. A twenty person tray order is not a bigger version of a burrito. It needs a cutoff time, a headcount builder, a delivery window tied to a meeting rather than to right now, and an office manager who can be reached again next month. Delivery apps were designed around the opposite of every one of those. They optimize for a single diner, an immediate courier and an anonymous customer, and they price the whole thing as a percentage, which means the better your catering business gets, the more it costs to run through them.

The rest of the metro fills in around that core. Ingersoll, the East Village and Court Avenue carry the dinner and weekend trade, Drake feeds a campus, Historic Valley Junction and the west side suburbs of Clive, Urbandale, Johnston, Waukee and Ankeny run on family orders, and the east side carries a deep Latino, Bosnian, Burmese, Vietnamese and Sudanese restaurant base built by decades of resettlement. All of it spikes in August for the fair and every Saturday of market season. On a flat plan none of those spikes change your bill.

Which parts of the metro can you serve?

Whatever radius you set. The storefront runs on your own domain, with per location hours, prep buffers and delivery zones.

Downtown + Skywalk
East Village
Court Avenue
Ingersoll
Drake
Beaverdale
Sherman Hill
Highland Park
Historic Valley Junction
West Des Moines
Clive
Urbandale
Johnston
Ankeny
Altoona
Waukee

For the record: Zayos has no Iowa customers and no Iowa office. Zay Revenue Group is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, its one live restaurant is Naya Grill in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, and Des Moines is a market it serves remotely.

Des Moines operator questions

How is the catering fee different from a commission?
A commission comes out of the restaurant. The Zayos catering service fee is 10% and it is paid by the diner at checkout, the same way the $0.99 pickup and $2.99 delivery fees are. On a $650 catering order the restaurant keeps all $650 and the customer pays $65 on top. On a marketplace at a 25% blended rate the restaurant would keep about $487.50 of the same order.
Does one catering order a week really pay for this?
Do the arithmetic. A $650 drop at a 25% blended marketplace rate costs about $162.50 in commission. Once a week that is roughly $8,450 a year. The Operator plan is $499 per location per month, which is $5,988 a year, and it covers your entire pickup, delivery and dine-in ordering as well. One standing office order a week more than pays for the platform.
Is Zayos live in Des Moines?
No. Zay Revenue Group is a Fort Lauderdale, Florida company and all of its restaurants are in South Florida. Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, is the only one live and taking orders on Zayos today. There is no Iowa office and no local rep. Des Moines is served remotely, and everything from menu build to kitchen tablet setup happens over screen share.
Most of my business is a weekday lunch rush, not catering. Does this still fit?
Yes, and downtown is the reason. A skywalk lunch crowd is high frequency and low ticket, which is the volume profile where a flat monthly fee wins by the widest margin. At a $16 lunch ticket and a 25% blended rate, each app order takes about $4. Past roughly 125 orders a month the $499 Operator plan is already the cheaper option, and every order after that carries no commission.
Can I take deposits or invoice a corporate account?
Catering orders can be scheduled, quoted and captured through the storefront checkout, and the order record carries the contact and the history so a repeat corporate booking is a two minute job rather than a phone call and a text thread. Payment methods and terms are configured per location during onboarding.
What happens during the State Fair and the farmers market season?
Your bill does not move, which is the point of a flat fee. August and the Saturday market months are when volume spikes and a percentage fee bills you the most. On Zayos the plan is $499 to $699 per location per month in August exactly as it is in February, so the busy season is the season the direct channel pays for itself several times over.
Do I have to leave DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub?
No. Keep them for discovery and move your regulars and your corporate accounts to your own site. On Operator plus Marketplace at $599 per location per month, Otter ingests marketplace tickets onto the same kitchen tablet as your direct orders, so the kitchen runs one screen.
Related reading
Catering operators →
The full catering build, in detail.
Minneapolis ordering →
The other skyway lunch city.
Chicago ordering →
Corporate catering at scale.
Denver ordering →
Another downtown office core.
Also: pricing · how it works · what is Zayos · all cities

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