Corporate Catering in Indianapolis: How to Feed Your Office Without the Headache

The hardest part of catering an office lunch in Indianapolis isn't the food. It's everything around it. Counting heads. Calling three places. Tracking down dietary restrictions over Slack. Finding out at 11:45 that the driver got lost on the way to your floor.

We handle corporate catering at Illinois Street Food Emporium, a scratch kitchen in Butler-Tarkington, and most of the calls we get start the same way. "I need lunch for fourteen on Thursday and I don't have time to think about it." That's the job. Not making the food look fancy on Instagram. Making it land at your conference room on time, with the right options for everyone in the meeting.

This is a guide to corporate catering in Indianapolis from someone who handles it every week.

The three formats most offices use

There are a dozen ways to feed a meeting. Most Indianapolis companies pick from three.

Box lunches

Box lunches are the standard for any meeting where people need to eat at their desks or grab and go. Each person gets their own sandwich or salad, a side, and a cookie. No serving line. No buffet shuffle. No leftover potato salad in a foil pan.

We do twelve box lunch options. The Emporium Club croissant box is the most popular. The Strawberry Chicken Salad box outperforms everything else when half the room is trying to eat lighter. Boxes start at $12 per person and top out at $18 for the salad-forward options. Full list is on the catering menu.

Box lunches work especially well for:

• Working lunches and lunch-and-learns

• Board meetings where people want to keep talking

• Construction sites and field office days

• Training sessions with rotating attendees

• Any meeting where each person needs to leave with their food

Platters and trays

Platters work when you have a longer meeting, a social element, or a group that wants to graze. Sandwich trays, wrap trays, antipasto, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, hummus, brie en croute, deviled eggs. Order a few, set them out, let people build their own plate.

Platters scale better for groups over twenty. Per-head cost usually drops a few dollars compared to box lunches because you're not paying for individual packaging.

Hot entree spreads

When the meeting is the event, hot entrees change the room. Tarkington Chicken over wild rice. Beef lasagna. Chicken parmesan. Penne rigati with grilled chicken. Beef stroganoff over egg noodles. We send these with house salad and house-baked bread, and they hold heat in the chafer for the duration of a real lunch meeting.

Use this format for client-facing lunches, holiday parties, board dinners, or any meeting where someone in the room is going to remember whether the food was good.

Dietary needs are not optional anymore

If you're booking corporate catering in Indianapolis in 2026 and your caterer doesn't ask about gluten-free, vegetarian, vegan, and dairy-free, find a different caterer. Every office of fifteen or more has at least one person managing a food restriction. Forgetting them once is enough to lose the meeting.

We build every catering order assuming there are dietary needs in the room. The Black Bean Salsa Salad is gluten-free and vegetarian. The Veggie Box swaps cleanly to vegan with a few easy substitutions. We carry Udi's gluten-free bread for sandwich subs. La Bête Noire and the Triple Nut Torte are both gluten-free desserts that don't taste like compromise.

Tell us the count and the restrictions when you order. We'll handle the sorting.

Where we deliver across Indianapolis

ISFE is on N Illinois Street in Butler-Tarkington, between Meridian Kessler and the Butler University campus. We deliver across Marion County, which covers most of the offices that book us regularly. Downtown Indianapolis offices to the south. Broad Ripple and Rocky Ripple to the north. Williams Creek and Crows Nest along the Meridian corridor. Most of the medical and corporate campuses on the north side of the city.

Delivery has a $150 minimum and a $25 delivery fee. Orders outside Marion County, after 4 PM, or above $500 may carry additional fees. Pickup at our Butler-Tarkington location works for any size order down to the 10-person catering minimum.

Browse the full catering menu.

A few things that make corporate catering go smoothly

These aren't ISFE rules. They're patterns that hold across any caterer in Indianapolis.

Order 48 hours out when you can. Our minimum is 24 hours, but the menu locks 48 hours before the event for changes. Earlier is always better, especially in November and December when every catering kitchen in the city is running at capacity.

Pick a day-of contact. One person who can be reached if there's a freight elevator issue or a security desk question. Every catering order that goes sideways goes sideways because nobody answered the phone.

Confirm headcount the day before. Not the morning of. The kitchen prepped your order before you woke up.

Order disposables when you need them. $40 covers basic equipment rental. Disposable plates, silverware, napkins, and cups are an add-on. If your office has nothing in the kitchen drawer, say so when you order, not when the food arrives.

Build a recurring relationship. Corporate catering is a relationship business. Find a place that gets the food right twice in a row and put them in your rotation. The third order is always smoother than the first.

What we bring to it

Illinois Street Food Emporium has been in Butler-Tarkington since 1979. Sherry Culpepper runs the bakery. The bread, the croissants, and the cookies that go in every box lunch are made here, that morning. Nothing comes in pre-made. Nothing has preservatives. The chicken salad gets mixed before your order leaves the building.

That's not a sales line. It's just how the kitchen has worked for forty-seven years. Most of the catering chains operating in Indianapolis right now didn't exist when ISFE started doing this. A few of them won't exist next year. We will.

If you handle catering at an Indianapolis office and you've been let down by chain catering, this is the alternative. A real scratch kitchen, made-that-morning food, by a place that's been feeding this neighborhood for two generations.

Book a catering order

The full catering menu and online ordering form lives at isfeindy.com/catering/menu. Phone orders go through 317-253-9513. We need 24 hours minimum and a 10-person minimum to put together an order, and earlier notice is always better.

Tell us the date, the headcount, and any dietary needs. We'll send back a recommendation that fits the room.