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Our story
Built in a real kitchen, by someone who kept losing money in one.
CaterIQ didn't start as software. It started as a caterer trying to figure out, before the event, whether the job was actually worth doing.
Bobby Howell is a CIA-trained chef who runs Hosted by Howell, a catering company known for refined plated dinners, full-service buffets, and large-scale institutional programs.
The food was never the problem. The math was. Like most independent caterers, Bobby quoted from memory and his last invoice, then reconciled the numbers weeks later in a spreadsheet, if at all. By the time the real cost of a 120-guest wedding was clear, the event was long over and the margin was whatever it turned out to be.
The frustrating part wasn't the losing jobs. It was not knowing which ones they were until it was too late to do anything.
So CaterIQ began as an internal tool: a way to cost a menu properly, attach a real margin to every proposal, and see the number before hitting send. It ran on Hosted by Howell's own events first. Real menus, real invoices, real weddings, long before it was a product anyone else could buy.
It still does. Every feature earns its place by surviving a live kitchen before it ships.
Bobby Howell
Founder, Hosted by Howell & CaterIQ
Culinary Institute of America alumnus
The insight
Catering math isn't restaurant math.
Every cost tool on the market prices one dish per person. A spread for 73 guests with four dishes is not 73 of everything. The caterer makes a judgment call on each plate, and that judgment is the whole game. Nothing modeled it, so we did.
1.0
Plated
Every guest gets one.
0.75
Buffet
Most guests take one.
0.5
Spread
About one per two guests.
0.33
Cocktail
Grazing, not a full plate.
A per-item serving ratio drives every cost. Change the guest count and the lines rescale by the operator's own serving ratios, not a spreadsheet's guess.
How we build
Three things we won't compromise on.
Margin first
Pretty proposals are easy. We care about the number behind them. If a feature doesn’t help you protect margin, it doesn’t ship.
Tested in service
Everything runs on a working catering business before it reaches yours. No theoretical workflows, no demo-ware.
Honest by default
Your data is yours, encrypted, isolated per account, and never used to train AI models. The margin we show you is the real one.
Built in a real kitchenHosted by Howell
We built CaterIQ to quote our own events at Hosted by Howell. Now every proposal goes out with the real margin attached, so we stopped finding out which jobs lost money after they were already over.
Bobby Howell
Founder, Hosted by Howell
Built for people who actually run a kitchen.
14 days free. No credit card. The same tool that runs Hosted by Howell's events, ready for yours.