ezCater was born out of a unique and largely unmet need: making business catering simple and seamless. Across industries, professionals regularly manage meals for meetings, events, and entire organizations, but “chief catering officer” isn’t anyone’s official title. The pandemic added an additional layer of complexity: Headcount fluctuates on any given day, making food for work more challenging, and arguably more important.
“The value of food in the workplace has evolved,” said Chief Technology Officer Erin DeCesare. “With fewer in-office days, shared meals are more than just a convenience — they’re a key part of fostering community.”
Managing food for the workplace is high stakes: Where should we order from? How much food should we get? What should we do if the food doesn’t show up on time and as expected? When you add in dietary preferences, company policies, budgets, and expensing, it can quickly get overwhelming. ezCater can help solve these complexities, thanks to nearly two decades of catering data, a network of more than 100,000 restaurants nationwide, and Slack as their workplace operating system.
Almost all of ezCater’s communication, collaboration, and coordination happens in Slack: The teams work in over 950 Slack channels, with 600 workflows, over 120 integrations, and 160 Slack Connect channels. They’re strong users of huddles, clips, lists, and canvases, and more recently, have tapped Slack AI and Agentforce, the agentic layer of the Salesforce platform.
“Slack is our workplace OS, which makes it a very natural fit for us to deploy Agentforce,” said Enterprise Architect Chris Puzzo. Accessible right from Slack, Agentforce provides always-on, digital labor at ezCater’s fingertips. “We’re really excited about the integration of Slack and Agentforce: It’s a big piece of what will allow us to confidently step into this new agentic world. Because our whole company works out of Slack, it can save everyone time and allow us to centralize business knowledge.”
“Agentforce can reason and make sense of all our data and make real-time, proactive recommendations in Slack. It really is like we all have a bunch of assistants working on our behalf.”
Scaling a limitless digital workforce, no new tools required
ezCater sees Slack and Agentforce as a potential way to introduce AI-driven support to internal teams in a familiar environment, no new skills required. “With Agentforce in Slack, our employees — who are experts in handling complex workplace food orders — will be able to test and refine the system,” said Puzzo. “Slack allows us to interact with AI as a teammate, without the need for additional tools.”
Let’s say a customer requests lunch for next week’s big meeting. Agentforce would look at their previous orders — cuisine preferences, budget, headcount — and scour dozens of restaurants to provide recommendations to the human rep in seconds. “Agentforce can run through all that data in the background and spit out the best option,” said Senior Manager of Customer Service Stephanie Litke-Avery. “Meanwhile, the customer service rep really can focus on the tasks where they shine.”
Beyond simplifying workflows, Slack serves as a foundation for future enhancements. “Slack allows our teams to ease into agentic work in a way that feels natural,” said Puzzo. For example, resolving ezCater customer compensation issues can take a single customer support employee about 20 minutes per case. To ease the burden on their support team, ezCater worked with Slack to build and pilot an assistive compensation agent with Agentforce.
“Slack’s Professional Services team brought our vision to reality in five short weeks,” said Puzzo. Guided by ezCater policies, the agent provides customers with recommendations based on predefined compensation tiers. Let’s say an order was both late and spilled along the way. The agent would respond with a discount within ezCater’s established guidelines — but this complex case requires a more generous number. Feedback, like a thumbs-down emoji, signals an exception to the agent, who then adjusts and fine-tunes future responses accordingly.
“The shift to AI and agentic infrastructure can sound intimidating, but at its core, it’s simple: Just use natural language to tell Agentforce what you need in Slack. It’s exciting to see how easily our team can adopt and leverage this technology, making it more powerful and accessible across the organization.”
Moving forward, ezCater looks forward to leveraging Agentforce and Slack as a testing ground to hone solutions. “And this is just the beginning. As Slack becomes a more natural hub for customer service, we see opportunities to expand access, helping not just customer service reps, but account managers and other teams,” said Puzzo. “Agentforce can connect both sides of our marketplace and bring all of our customer, CRM, and operational data into one platform.”
