Max’s Restaurant brought in $187,000 in prepaid holiday sales with ordering events. Here’s how to learn from their playbook and plan bundles, timelines, order caps, and promos.
Holiday preorders let your restaurant sell festive meals before the rush, so you get paid upfront and know exactly what to cook. These ordering events are limited-time preorder menus with set quantities that guests pay for in advance and pick up on a set schedule.
Max’s Restaurant North America, a Filipino casual dining chain with more than two dozen locations in the U.S. and Canada, used ordering events to bring in $187,000 in prepaid sales during the 2025 holidays: $79,000 for Thanksgiving and $108,000 for Christmas. Marketing Manager Care Pantojan shared the playbook in Popmenu’s webinar, The $10K Day: How Restaurants Are Creating Big Sales Moments.
- $187,000Total
- $79,000Thanksgiving
- $108,000Christmas
At a glance: 5 steps to a profitable holiday ordering event
- Build two or three meal bundles from your historically best selling dishes.
- Launch one to two weeks before the holiday, with a firm order cutoff and pickup spread over two days.
- Cap orders per pickup window, limit scarce items and require payment at checkout.
- Link to a single dedicated ordering page from every ad, email and text.
- Print prep sheets, brief both teams on pickup, then review results before the next holiday.
Why holiday preorders are worth it
During the holidays, guests and restaurants want the same gift: time. Guests want a holiday feast without hours in the kitchen, and your team wants the predictability of prepaid sales.
Guest demand is climbing. In Popmenu’s November 2025 survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, 58% planned to order from or dine at restaurants for Thanksgiving, up from 42% in 2024. Most of that was off-premises: 53% planned takeout or delivery, up from 37% the year before. The top reason, cited by 63%, was wanting to enjoy the holiday without the cooking.
What is a restaurant ordering event?
A restaurant ordering event is a limited-time menu of preorder items with set quantities. Guests pay when they order and pick up during a time window the restaurant chooses. The menu, quantities, and pickup times are all set ahead of time, so the kitchen cooks to a known number of orders.
1. Build holiday meal bundles from past bestsellers
Your holiday menu can lean on dishes guests already love. Look back at previous holiday orders, pick the most popular meals and dishes, and group items that complement each other into packages with festive names, such as “Thanksgiving Feast Bundle.”
Max’s builds celebration bundles of five to seven items, depending on the location’s size. Naming the meals tells guests exactly what each offer is for and saves them from assembling a meal à la carte.
“The goal really is to make planning easier for our guests,” Pantojan said. “Instead of ordering every item individually, now they can purchase a thoughtfully assembled bundle.”
Keep things simple for your kitchen with two to three bundle options. Make each one easy to buy by listing:
- Number of servings
- Included dishes
- Ingredients and allergens
- An appetizing photo or two
Sell popular items on their own as well, such as sides without the turkey, for guests who prefer to do some of the cooking.
2. Set your preorder timeline: launch, cutoff, and pickup
Work backward from the holiday. Before the first order comes in, put three dates on the calendar: when promotion starts, when orders close, and when guests pick up.
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Launch
Go live one to two weeks before the holiday. Max’s typically starts promoting its holiday ordering events about two weeks out, which gives guests time to find the menu, coordinate plans and order. For Thanksgiving, that means launching around November 12, ahead of guests’ grocery runs.
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Cutoff
Close orders at whatever point your kitchen considers reasonable. Two days before pickup is a common rule of thumb: it leaves time to buy only the ingredients those orders need, which takes out guesswork and cuts food waste. Some restaurants keep orders open longer. Max’s sends its final Christmas reminder on Dec. 23, the day before Christmas Eve.
“I love that aspect of the lack of waste, where you’re taking the orders up front, before you buy any of the materials that you need to put the meals together,” said Popmenu CEO and Co-founder Brendan Sweeney.
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Pickup
Spread pickup across more than one day, such as the two days before the holiday. Confirm the timing with your kitchen team, and give guests clear pickup directions to avoid confusion.
3. Cap orders to protect your kitchen
Holiday orders only help if your kitchen can handle the volume. Agree on limits with the kitchen and front-of-house before you launch. These guardrails keep holiday preorders manageable:
“Marketing and operations should work hand-in-hand,” Pantojan said. “At Max’s, we don’t market if we know our operations are not good, because you’re just wasting money.”
Taking preorders online is the biggest time-saver of all.
“Back in the day, accepting pre-orders was a manual process, so our teams had to collect customer information, record the order, process the deposit and monitor the balance,” Pantojan said. “There were a lot of moving parts, and there are opportunities for errors, for sure.”
With ordering events, guests choose their items and pay in advance, and the restaurant sets pickup windows, per-window order caps, item limits, the order cutoff and minimums in one place.
4. Send every promotion to one ordering event page
Create one webpage for your holiday ordering event with everything guests need: bundles, prices, the order deadline and pickup times. Make it the single destination for your website navigation, emails, texts, social posts and paid ads. Fewer clicks to complete an order means fewer abandoned orders.
Max’s puts its ordering event link in Meta ads, email campaigns, and text messages to keep the path to purchase short: from the ad, to the landing page, to the ordering event, where guests complete a prepaid order.
“The less clicks, the better,” Pantojan said.
Plan reminders for the whole ordering window to keep your events top of mind. Max’s introduces the offer by email, follows up about two days later and sends more reminders as the holiday approaches. Keep each reminder short, with what’s included and when orders close.
A last-call text right before orders close catches guests who meant to order but haven’t yet. Max’s sends its final Christmas reminder by text on Dec. 23, the day before Christmas Eve.
“It’s a lot of work, but you need to be consistent,” Pantojan said.
Promote the event in-house, too. Table cards, receipt messages and a quick mention from staff let regulars know they can bring their favorite restaurant home for the holidays.
5. Run pickup smoothly, then review the results
When the order window closes, print individual order details, a prep sheet and item totals so your team knows what to make and where each order goes.
On pickup days, share the pickup schedule with both back- and front-of-house so everyone is in sync. Let guests know there may be a short wait at peak times; setting expectations helps the event end on a happy note.
After the rush, review the event while it’s fresh: total revenue, top-selling items and anything that sold out. Compare the orders you accepted with what your team could comfortably handle, then adjust bundle sizes, item quantities, staffing or pickup windows for the next ordering event.
“Thanksgiving and Christmas were two of our strongest sales periods last year. But that success did not happen overnight,” Pantojan said.
Max’s used its Thanksgiving results to prepare its multi-location team for Christmas. Management brought franchisees and operators together before the winter holiday to review volume and plan for an even busier event. Christmas brought in $108,000, up from $79,000 at Thanksgiving, and two locations alone took in about $14,000 and nearly $20,000 from their Christmas ordering events.
Ordering events vs. catering: which to use
Ordering events and catering are related offerings, but they do each offer their own benefits and you can offer both during the holidays. The difference is who sets the terms.
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Ordering events are restaurant-led. You set a limited menu, quantities and pickup windows, and many guests order from the same offer. They fit holiday meals, seasonal specials and high-volume days.
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Catering is guest-led. One customer orders food for a specific group, date and headcount, often from a broader menu, with a lead time you set, such as 24 or 72 hours’ notice. It fits office lunches, parties and holiday gatherings. See what catering could add with Popmenu’s catering savings calculator.
Run ordering events year-round
Thanksgiving and Christmas are natural fits, and the same format works any time guests gather. Max’s uses the same bundle approach for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Once you’ve perfected your approach, keep it on the calendar for New Year’s Eve, the Super Bowl, Valentine’s Day, Easter and graduation season, too.
With a little planning and the right ordering tools, any holiday or special occasion can become a predictable sales moment for your restaurant.
Watch The $10K Day on demand for Care’s full holiday playbook and a step-by-step ordering event setup demo.