Abstract: Catering industry is an important source of air pollution, but the knowledge of its status, activity level and emissions are limited. Taking Heze City as an example, the basic status of the catering service suppliers was obtained by means of restaurant-to-restaurant survey, and finalized with an emission inventory of air pollutants from catering industry in 2016. It was found that:(1) There were totally 9259 catering service units in Heze City, of which 4% were large-size, 14% were medium-size, and 82% were small-size. The spatial distribution was related to population concentration and mobility, which should be taken into account in the numerical simulation of air quality. (2) There were significant correlations between the number of employees and the number of stove heads (y=2.5x^1.3, R²=0.93) and between the number of seats and the number of stove heads (y=23.0x^1.5, R²=0.98). These relationships enrich the means of characterizing the size of a catering service unit. (3) Only 45% of the investigated catering service units were equipped with oil fume abatement devices, and the equipment rates were 64%, 59% and 41% for large, medium and small units, respectively. The arithmetic averages of the actual removal efficiencies were 52.8%, 49.1% and 32.1% for large, medium and small units, respectively, which suggests that the larger the size of catering service units, the more attention was paid to the purification of oil fumes. (4) The pollution of catering industry in Heze came from oil fumes and/or fuels, of which SO₂, NO_x, NH₃, CO and OC were exclusively from the use of fuels, while PM₁₀, PM_2.5, VOCs and BC were jointly contributed by fuel-burning process and oil fume formation, with oil fume dominating. (5) With respect to energy use, fuel gases dominated the energy structure at a share as high as 76%, whereas the percentages of liquid fuels, coal and biomass were only 6%, 11% and 7%, respectively, and electricity contributed less than 1% to the total energy consumed in the catering industry. Based on this study, key efforts on the control of cooking fume emission are the popularization, capability maintenance and operation guarantee of cooking fume purification equipment, which depends on the strengthened the supervision by relevant departments.