How Old Orchard Cafe & Catering Strengthened Their Market Position with Strategic Marketing

There's a moment in every Sioux Falls office that decides who gets the order. It's 3:40 in the afternoon, there are twenty-six people in a training room tomorrow at noon, and someone has to pick lunch. Whoever that person finds first — and trusts — wins the day.

For more than thirty years, Old Orchard Cafe & Catering has been the answer to that moment. Box lunches, hot buffets, breakfast trays, and full-service catering for meetings, conferences, board rooms, job sites, and family gatherings across the metro — real food, made that morning, carried in by their own crew in red shirts. The food was never the problem. The problem was that the office manager searching "catering Sioux Falls" on a phone at 3:40 was landing on a national ordering platform instead. That's where Complete Media came in.

About Old Orchard Cafe & Catering

Old Orchard opened in 1992 as a neighborhood cafe on 56th Street in Sioux Falls, cooking everything from scratch each morning. Around 2001, regulars started asking the kitchen to feed their teams, and box lunches quietly became a second business. By 2012 catering had taken over — a dedicated crew, delivery vans, and delivery windows the company treats as promises. Today Old Orchard feeds the whole metro from the same kitchen, with the same care. Reach them at 605.940.1965 or oldorchardsiouxfalls.com.

• Box lunch delivery — sandwiches, wraps, salads, sides, and treats packed and labeled.
• Hot lunch buffets — entrees, sides, and setup for conferences and company events.
• Breakfast and morning catering for early meetings and all-day sessions.
• Special event and family catering — celebrations, receptions, gatherings.
• Delivery and setup by their own team — never a third-party courier.
• Orders from 5 to 5,000 — small board rooms to large conferences.

Four things they don't compromise on: on time, made today, exactly right, and real care from the phone to the kitchen to the door. That isn't language borrowed from a brochure — it's the standard posted on their own wall, and it became the spine of everything we built.

The challenge

Old Orchard had everything a Sioux Falls business buyer wants, and almost none of it was working online:

• National ordering platforms, delivery apps, and restaurant directories owned page one for 'catering Sioux Falls' and 'box lunch delivery' — then charged local kitchens to be listed
• The catering side was hidden behind the cafe story, even though catering had been the main business for a decade
• The website didn't answer the questions that actually close an order — lead time, minimums, delivery area, setup, dietary options
• Brand presentation drifted between menus, box labels, vehicle graphics, and the website
• No structured presence in ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity, where office managers now ask 'who caters lunch for 30 people in Sioux Falls?'
• Kitchen time is finite — from 4am prep to the last delivery, nobody in that building has an hour for a marketing dashboard

The strategy

Corporate catering is a repeat, low-drama purchase made under time pressure. The buyer isn't shopping for the cheapest option — they're shopping for the one that won't embarrass them at noon. So the goal was never volume. It was being the obvious, low-risk Sioux Falls answer the moment someone starts looking, and making the reasons to trust Old Orchard impossible to miss.

The work completed

Branding

The positioning was already true; we made it the spine of everything: fresh, innovative, personal — and on time, every time. We tightened logo usage across the website, menus, box labels, vehicle graphics, staff shirts, and social profiles, so the red shirts walking into a board room match the mark the client saw on Google that morning — then replaced generic catering language with specifics: since 1992, 30+ years, orders from 5 to 5,000, delivered and set up by our own crew.

Print marketing

• Catering menus and box lunch sheets that answer minimums, lead time, and pricing up front
• Drop-off materials and box labeling that carry the brand into every meeting room
• Direct mail and reminder pieces timed to budget season and busy meeting months
• Business cards, quote folders, and order forms for sales conversations
• Signage and vehicle graphics — a delivery van downtown is a billboard that shows up on time

Website development

We built oldorchardsiouxfalls.com around what a catering buyer comes to do: see the food, understand the options, and get a quote. Fast and mobile-first, because most of this research happens on a phone between meetings. Real photography of the spreads, the boxes, and the crew instead of stock food. Clear pages for the menu, catering types, about, reviews, and contact — each with an obvious path to request a quote or call. Structured data, clean headings, strong Core Web Vitals, and descriptive alt text throughout.

SEO

Search work focused on real-intent terms — catering Sioux Falls, box lunch delivery Sioux Falls, corporate catering Sioux Falls, office lunch catering, event catering South Dakota — each mapped to a page built to answer that search. Tighter titles and metas, internal linking between menu, catering, and quote pages, and content that turns thirty years of kitchen knowledge into pages a national platform can't fake.

Local visibility

Google Business Profile optimized with accurate categories, service area, hours, real food photography, and regular posts. Citations cleaned so name, address, and phone match everywhere. And a review habit built into the end of every large order — in catering, the reviews are the tasting.

AI visibility optimization

More buyers open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity before Google. Those systems answer from clear, structured, well-cited content — so we made Old Orchard easy to quote: plain-language pages about what they cater and how ordering works, real numbers with context, FAQs written the way office managers actually ask, schema markup on the business, and consistent facts across the site, Google, and directories.

Ongoing marketing support

A partnership, not a project: monthly content, seasonal campaigns timed to meeting and holiday catering windows, Google Business Profile updates, social support, menu updates as the kitchen changes, print as needed, and reporting that shows what actually generated quote requests and phone calls.

The results

• A brand that finally matches the reputation — three decades of Sioux Falls catering, presented like it
• Higher-quality quote requests from businesses who found Old Orchard directly instead of through a platform
• Improved local search visibility for Sioux Falls catering and box lunch terms
• Catering positioned as the main business rather than a side note of the cafe story
• Growing AI search presence — Old Orchard now surfaces in assistant answers about Sioux Falls catering
• Stronger brand recognition across offices that see the red shirts and the boxes every week
• Kitchen time back, which during a 5,000-guest week is the highest-return result of all

Why it matters

When a Sioux Falls company can find a local kitchen instead of a national platform, the money, the hospitality, and the accountability all stay here. The people who cooked your lunch are the people who carry it in, and they live three miles away. Strong marketing isn't about being loud. It's about making sure the best local option is also the easiest one to find.

About Complete Media

Complete Media is a Sioux Falls marketing agency that has partnered with 250+ local businesses since 2002 — restaurants and food service, construction and trades, home services, insurance, real estate, retail, and non-profits. Branding, websites, print, SEO, AI visibility, and digital advertising from one local partner. See more client success stories.

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