How to Open a Burrito Bowl Catering Business

Mexican cuisine is beloved around the world. It’s no surprise since the food is extremely tasty and has a range of spices and flavors that suit the palette. So if you’re interested in starting your burrito bowl catering service, you have the chance to have a lucrative business that can easily become popular if you provide quality food. Here are a few tips on how to open your business.

Renovate Your Space

As you get started on your burrito bowl catering business, you’ll need to renovate your space to make it suitable for customers and workers. Do you have exterior or interior debris you must clear out? If so, it may the time to call commercial demolition contractors. Your exterior may have tree stumps, uneven pavement, and unsightly vegetation that you have to clear out quickly. Doing so will be the first step in ensuring you have a paved parking lot, a clean walkway, and a nice landscape that can impress potential customers. After all, curb appeal is just as important to a commercial business as it is to your residential property.

To get the ball rolling on renovating your space, you should enlist the services of an interior designer. Try to find one who has worked with other commercial properties and who can give you insight into the best way to design a space that can work for a catering company or restaurant. So, as you do renovations, think about whether or not you want your burrito bowl catering space to just be a catering service that delivers or operates as a sit-down restaurant. Such a consideration will be a huge deal in your overall layout and how much space you have for your kitchen.

Hire commercial painters to add the right color. Before painting, they’ll repair and update the interior and exterior walls as needed. Then, they will paint them any color you wish. You can match your business logo color or stay neutral with white, off-white, gray, or earth tones.

Install Security Features

All businesses should have a good amount of security. Whether you’re on the clock at your burrito bowl catering business or have gone home for the day, your building should always be secure to protect you, your staff, or your customers. Electronic security should include locks and access codes. Have security cameras in strategic places outside and inside your catering facility. As a burrito bowl catering business owner, you have to worry about people stealing food, equipment, or profits for the night.

Fix Your Parking Lot

As you do your renovations, take the time to have a safe parking lot for everyone coming on your property. An unsafe parking lot is a liability for any business. Make note of any cracks, potholes, or uneven leveling. If you see any vulnerabilities that could potentially harm a car or a pedestrian, have them fixed immediately by calling an asphalt patching service. Such professionals can quickly fill any cracks or potholes and smooth them out. However, if you have extensive damage in your parking lot, you may need to pull up the existing pavement and have it completely redone from scratch.

Your parking lot should also include obvious designated parking lines. People need clear markers for parking to avoid any issues. Parking lines and signs can also quickly and effectively direct people on where to drive in the parking lot and how to drive out. Such directives can help them avoid accidents that can occur within a parking lot. By law, your commercial parking lot should have designated spaces for emergency vehicles such as fire trucks and ambulances. You also need a certain amount of space to accommodate handicapped drivers.

Not taking your parking lot space seriously can involve liability for your business. If you have cracks or holes, anyone can trip. If staff or customers trip and fall in a parking lot and hurt themselves, you could be liable.

Keep Pests Away

As with any food service facility, a burrito bowl catering needs to take the right precautions to protect itself from pests. Insects like cockroaches, ants, and rodents are always searching for food and water. Protect your business from an infestation by hiring industrial pest control services. These professionals will look for signs of an existing infestation as well as prevent a future one from occurring.

There are many paths that your business will have to worry about. Termites don’t just affect residences, they can tear into any wood structure, and that includes your commercial property. According to the EPA, termites can ruin a structure in as little as three years. What if you have too many bees swarming around? Normally, bees don’t attack people unless they feel threatened and are a vital part of the ecosystem due to their pollination activities. However, if you need a killer bee extermination due to their aggressive nature, call local exterminators to make sure you and your customers are safe.

After going through all that work to open up your burrito bowl catering business, the last thing you want is to be shut down due to health code violations. When you are serving food to the public, you must stay in health compliance to ensure that your business doesn’t inadvertently spread foodborne illnesses such as E. coli salmonella, and other food poisons. If you have an untreated pest infestation, such as rodents and cockroaches, their feces and urine can easily infest your working area as well as the food itself. If your business has such an infestation, it may have to shut down temporarily or permanently.

Remodel Your Bathrooms

Once people sit down to enjoy your burrito bowls and some margaritas, expect them to frequently run to the bathroom. The busier your business is, the more bathrooms you should have to accommodate people. Plus, you also need bathrooms to accommodate your staff. Sure, you hire a local commercial plumbing contractor to ensure that your drains and piping are up to par. They can check your piping for signs of leaks that could damage your commercial property and cause water damage. If you have drain issues or problems with your septic tank, it could lead to sewage backups and toilets that constantly overflow. That would be a major sanitation issue for your business and it isn’t something that would please customers.

In addition to ensuring that your plumbing is in compliance with government regulations, you could further update your bathrooms by installing new fixtures. Dual-flush toilets help your business save water and money. According to the EPA, the typical toilet wastes five gallons of water in every flush. However, a high-efficiency toilet would only use slightly more than one gallon. As a result, your business would save a lot of money on the monthly water bill.

Create an Inviting Dining Room

When customers come to eat at your burrito bowl catering business, you want them to feel as comfortable as possible. Do so by creating an inviting dining room. The first step in inviting commercial dining space is to have comfortable new tables and chairs. If you want customers to stay long enough to order more food or bring a large dining party with them ensure your seats are properly upholstered. Have tables that range from small single tables to large ones that can accommodate bigger dining parties.

In addition to good seating, you should keep your dining room floors shiny, new, and safe. Whether you have a floor made from stone, tile, or hardwood, further protect it with epoxy sealing. This floor covering provides a protective layer that can last for several years with good maintenance. This invisible sealant not only protects your floors, it also protects customers from slips and falls. The sealed floors are easier to maintain as you only need a broom and a mop to clean; no special equipment is needed.

Don’t forget about your dining room windows. Having windows can ensure your dining room never becomes stuffy or fuels closed in. Restaurant windows can come in any style, ranging from French windows to sliding windows to double pane windows. Just make sure that your windows are also energy efficient so that they can help make sure the space remains cool in summer and warm in winter. Enhance your aesthetic by having the right window coverings. These coverings can include industrial blinds, manual shutters, automatic shutters, and so on.

Find a Waste Removal Service

Professional waste removal is a necessity for any business, especially when dealing with food. After all, properly getting rid of waste ensures you stay within sanitation compliance of your local vicinity. Proper trash removal also helps you prevent vermin from coming into your business or its surrounding area. So make sure you have regular garbage pickup services for your burrito bowl catering company. Have an area to put out the trash every night, or a few times a day, depending on how many hours your business operates.

You can arrange to have commercial trash bins in various sizes on your property. If you know you have a full House of customers all day, then you may want to have more than one large container available to store all the trash needed. Don’t forget about recycling. If you want to keep your business eco-friendly, have separate bins to contain plastic, glass, and other non-recyclable items.

Schedule Seasonal Services

Before you know it, winter will be here again. If your burrito bowl catering service is in a seasonal climate, you should invest in the appropriate seasonal services. With winter approaching, your business should be prepared to handle snow removal. After all, if snow and ice are allowed to build up outside, it would make it hard for customers and employees alike to get inside. You will have a safety hazard if you don’t regularly put down salt to combat any ice that builds up.

Once winter goes away and eventually it turns into spring, you have to worry about lawn upkeep. If you have a landscape in your commercial exterior. You want to keep it as green and beautiful as possible. When spring comes and snow melts, you may need to call commercial landscapers to clean up any underlying debris under the snow. They should also prep your landscape for spring to ensure it’s properly fertilized and no weeds have sprouted out over winter. That can also be the time to plant some flower beds around your property if you want to further beautify your exterior and track more customers to eat burritos at your facility.

Invest in Delivery Vehicles

Anyone who operates a food service should take advantage of delivering to customers. Thanks to apps like Uber Eats and Door Dash, it’s easier than ever to provide food delivery in your area. However, you don’t have to rely on those apps if you don’t want to, as you can also have your own delivery service. By incorporating your company delivery vehicles, you can further advertise your business any time of day.

Delivery vehicles can host your company name and contact information. If people see a van or car marked with burrito bowls going down the street, it may remind them that they haven’t had Mexican food in a while and they may seek out your business. You could further make your delivery vehicle stand out by investing in vehicle wrap services. These vehicle wrap advertisements can put whatever you want on the car. You can incorporate pictures of your burrito bowl, mascot, logo, business name, social media handles, and more.

There’s nothing like a tasty burrito when one is craving it. So, if you’re ready to unleash your burrito bowl catering company to the hungry public, make sure you do it right. With the right food service and commercial building set up, you have the means to have a very successful business that people will keep coming to. If your initial business is successful, you can set yourself up to have a chain of catering facilities around your area or even nationwide. Start with these initial steps to get the ball going on a potentially lucrative career.