Case study · Catering delivery
Catering done right: how Illegal Pete’s drove a 930% increase in tips with Olo and Cartwheel
Bringing catering online with Olo and Cartwheel grew tips from 6% to 85% of orders and lifted average tips by 930%, with 49% more orders in three months.
About the company
Illegal Pete’s is a Colorado-based group of quick-service, fast-casual Mission-style burrito restaurants. The brand has run in-house catering delivery since 2001, with its own drivers handling every catering order across its locations.
The challenge
A catering operation with no digital tip path.
Last year, Illegal Pete’s set out to modernize its catering business. The deliveries themselves worked, but the system around them was manual. There was no online ordering portal for catering customers, which meant no standardized way to capture tips digitally, limited visibility into order flow, and no easy way to optimize delivery across a growing operation.
The tip gap was the clearest symptom. Only 6% of orders included a tip, not because customers didn’t want to tip, but because there was no frictionless way to do it. On the back end, splitting tips across non-salaried staff was a manual accounting task that ate time and contributed to turnover.
The solution
Olo for ordering, Cartwheel for delivery.
Illegal Pete’s implemented Olo to power online ordering and Cartwheel to manage delivery. Together they brought the full catering operation online, with three Cartwheel capabilities doing the heavy lifting.
Branded driver tracking link
Real-time tracking that stays on the Illegal Pete’s brand, all the way to the door.
Delivery polygons
Defined delivery zones that keep catering orders within reliable, serviceable range.
Tip reporting
A cashless tipping system that captures every tip and makes splitting them simple.
The combination is what made it work. An online portal without reliable delivery management creates a different set of problems, and delivery management without the online layer means tip capture stays broken. For a brand running all catering on in-house drivers, the two depend on each other.
“We consider Cartwheel to be a critical piece in being able to put catering online through Olo. One could not exist without the other.”
Results: every revenue metric up within three months
The three months before vs. after switching tell the full story.
Average tip figure excludes cash tips.
The outcome
A tipping process that pays off on both sides.
The headline is the 930% jump in average tips, but the operational win runs deeper. Cartwheel and Olo gave Illegal Pete’s a cashless tipping system that made splitting tips across all non-salaried employees easy. That saved the accounting team significant time and helped reduce employee turnover.
The clearest signal is the tip capture rate: from 6% of orders to 85%. Customers always wanted to tip, the mechanism simply wasn’t there. Putting ordering online created a frictionless path, and customers used it immediately. The 49% volume increase and 11% lift in both average order value and delivery fee show the impact extended well beyond tips: more orders, higher value per order, and a tipping system that works for customers and staff alike.