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Put Color on the Menu to Grow Your Small Business

Put Color on the Menu to Grow Your Small Business

By Kim Faber, event coordinator, The Catering Company
Close your eyes. Picture the best meal you’ve ever had. What do you see? I’m guessing it’s not a black-and-white image of a peanut butter sandwich, but instead a vibrant, colorful snapshot of a mouth-watering dish like a mile-high bowl of pasta, a fresh seafood platter or perfect cut of steak.

Anyone in the food industry knows, customers’ eyes are always bigger than their stomachs. Even so, it’s important that menus, event portfolios and other marketing collateral draw in clients with appetizing color and creativity that appeal to the senses.

At The Catering Co., a catering company in Grand Rapids, Michigan, we’re challenged daily to quickly produce customer proposals and marketing materials that grab attention, showcase our chef’s amazing work in the kitchen, and stand above the catering competition. To make a big impression, we needed a fast, reliable desktop printer that delivered brilliant, affordable color.

The Secret Ingredient for Success: Solid Ink

After realizing that the marketing materials produced by their black-and-white HP laser jet printer failed to entice customers with mouth-watering images, the Catering Co. investigated color printers and selected Xerox’s Phaser solid ink printer. This printer would not only allow us to infuse our documents with vivid color, but would also save the company time and money with fast print speeds, the ability to take on more advanced jobs such as personalized menus, brochures and event portfolios in-house, and easy installation and maintenance.

The print samples from the Phaser solid ink printer were outstanding—truer and more saturated than the competition. Unlike our previous printer, the Phaser also prints on a variety of media including card stock and envelopes, as well as custom page sizes from 3.5" x 5" to 8.5" x 14”, so we could create everything from sales proposals and presentations to promotional brochures in-house. And, with a six-second first-page-out time and print speeds of up to 24 pages-per-minute in color and black-and-white, we would be able to spend more time interacting with potential clients instead of waiting for prints.

Xerox's cartridge-free solid ink technology would also free up precious office space. The ink sticks, which are simply dropped into the color-coordinated ink trays, require minimal packaging and generate 90 percent less waste than comparable laser products.

Serving up Mouthwatering Color

The Phaser printer has surpassed our expectations and unleashed our creativity. We no longer present our clients with plain, gray-toned menus and event proposals, but high-quality color documents that grab their attention immediately and show The Catering Co.’s true colors.

Color is strategically used to convey the ambience of the event from an elegant, formal corporate affair to a casual graduation open house. Our menus feature more vivid images of unique dishes that appeal to the eyes as much as to the customer’s stomach. The Phaser printer allows us to create personalized proposals that show our clients how one-of-a-kind items such as deep red floral centerpieces can add a dramatic flair to their event. This was something we were unable to do before because of the high cost to outsource color print jobs. Our office team now prints more than 3,000 marketing documents each month on the Phaser printer and we’ve seen tremendous cost savings from doing more in-house.

The Catering Co. is also winning more bids due to the colorful and professional appearance of our marketing collateral, which translates directly into more revenue for the company.

The Phaser solid ink color printer was the best investment we’ve made in office equipment. After experiencing the benefits of solid ink technology first hand, The Catering Company will look for solid ink printers in the future.

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