FoodStorm alternatives
Looking at FoodStorm? Here is the honest comparison.
What they are
FoodStorm, described fairly
An order management system for GROCERY retailers — deli, bakery, floral and custom-cake counters, plus the catering those stores sell. Owned by Instacart and sold as part of Instacart Enterprise.
What it costs
What each of us publishes
The comparison people actually want, and the one most comparison pages are vaguest about.
FoodStorm
CaterCloud
Plans
Published on the pricing page. Free to start, and flat monthly — not per seat.
Per user
No per-user charge. Your crew do not change the bill.
Setup fee
None.
Pick them
When FoodStorm is the better choice
If one of these is you, they will serve you better than we will, and you should go and talk to them.
You are a grocery retailer. That is who the product is built for now — order-ahead across deli, bakery, floral and custom cake, not a caterer’s diary.
You run catering out of stores rather than out of a kitchen and a van, and you need it to sit alongside the counters.
You are already on Instacart Enterprise, in which case this is the piece that fits it.
You need multi-store rollout with an enterprise implementation behind it. CaterCloud is self-serve and has no implementation team.
Where we differ
What CaterCloud does that is genuinely different
The crew are free
A callout goes out as a text and your staff tap yes or no — no account, no app, no seat. Casual crew will never install software, and pricing that charges per user turns your roster into a bill.
It knows what the food costs
Quotes price against your ingredients and your overheads, and each event reports what it actually made. Most event software tracks what you charged; the harder question is what you kept.
It is built for a phone
The day, the money, the menus and the team are all designed for the device you actually have on you at a job, rather than a desktop screen shrunk down.
You can try it without talking to anyone
Free to start, and the widgets run in your browser before you sign up for anything.
Questions
What people ask when they are switching
- Is CaterCloud an alternative to FoodStorm?
- Usually not, and it is worth saying that before you read any further. FoodStorm is an order management system for grocery retailers — deli, bakery, floral and custom-cake counters, plus the catering those stores sell — and it is owned by Instacart and sold as part of Instacart Enterprise. If you are a grocer, we are not what you are looking for.
- When would CaterCloud be the right move instead?
- When the business is a catering business rather than a store: a kitchen, a diary, crew you roster, jobs you quote and events you run. That is a different shape of problem from order-ahead across a supermarket’s counters, and it is the one CaterCloud is built for.
- What does FoodStorm cost?
- They do not publish it. Their site asks you to book a demo, which is normal for enterprise software sold to grocery chains and tells you something useful about the size of buyer it is aimed at. CaterCloud publishes its prices on its own pricing page.
- I run catering out of a grocery store. Who should I use?
- Probably them. If your catering sits alongside deli and bakery counters and needs to share an ordering system with them, that is precisely what FoodStorm does and CaterCloud does not. We have no store-counter side and no multi-store rollout team.
- Does CaterCloud do online ordering at all?
- Yes, but for a caterer rather than a store. An order widget takes a fulfilment slot, a real order and a payment on your own website, without the quote round-trip a staffed event needs. What it is not is a counter system for a supermarket.
Found something here that is out of date or unfair? Tell us and we will correct it. That includes FoodStorm — the invitation is open to them too.