CravEngine is a marketing company for independent restaurants. We plan and run the marketing — social, email, text, promotions, campaigns — and we build Plate, our own software for owners who would rather run it themselves.
Some owners want the marketing off their plate entirely. Others want to keep their own voice and just want the work to be organised enough to actually happen. Both are real answers, and they are not competing offers — one is a company, the other is software.
Managed restaurant marketing
We plan the marketing and we do the work. Social, email and text campaigns, promotions, customer reactivation, creative and advertising — run for you, month after month, without you becoming a marketer.
Restaurant marketing software, powered by CravEngine
Our own software. Your menu, photos, hours, customer list and your email and text campaigns in one place, feeding the website we built you. You run the restaurant. Plate runs the marketing.
CravEngine runs the marketing for you.
Plate lets you run it yourself.
Not because anyone stopped caring. Because marketing is the one job in a restaurant with no shift, no deadline and nobody covering it when the room fills up.
Three posts in a good week, then nothing for a month because a cook quit. The account is not dead — it is just run by someone with a restaurant to open.
Names and emails collected over years, sitting in whatever system took them. Not one of those people has been sent anything, and every month more of them forget you exist.
Hours from two summers ago, a price that changed in spring, a dish you stopped making. It is the first thing a stranger sees and the last thing anyone updates.
A slow Tuesday gets a discount announced somewhere, once, with no way to tell afterwards whether it did anything.
The menu in one place, the photos on somebody’s phone, the customer list in whatever collected it, the hours in three places that disagree. Nothing is wrong exactly — it is just nowhere near being a system.
On a phone, three blocks away, comparing you to the place next door. If nothing has reached them and your menu will not load, you lost that one without ever knowing.
This is the part most restaurant software leaves you holding. CravEngine does the actual work — deciding what to run, writing it, making it, sending it and keeping it going — so the marketing does not depend on you finding a spare hour.
They came once. Something has to reach them before they forget. Usually where we start, because it costs the least and moves the fastest.
Planned, written, designed and sent — to the people who agreed to hear from you. We check that agreement before anything goes out.
The highest-attention channel a restaurant has, and the easiest to ruin. Used rarely, for things worth interrupting someone about, and only to numbers that opted in.
Finding the people who came once and stopped, and giving them a specific reason to come back.
Consistency is the whole game here, and consistency is exactly what a busy restaurant cannot manage by hand.
We handle the account — what goes out, how often, and in a voice that sounds like your restaurant rather than a marketing department.
Getting usable images out of what you already have, directing what to shoot next, and writing the words that go with them.
Built around your margin and your quiet shifts, rather than a discount that sounded generous at the time.
A reason, a window, somewhere to land and a way to tell afterwards whether it worked. Planned and executed, not announced and hoped about.
The holidays that matter to your kind of place, the seasonal menu, the slow month everyone forgets to plan for until it arrives.
Paid traffic only makes sense once there is somewhere good to send it. We build the website too, so there is.
Paid social and search aimed at the few miles that actually matter to a restaurant, built around a real offer with creative made from your food.
Designed and built by us around your menu and your photography — then kept accurate through Plate rather than left to drift.
What is worth doing for your restaurant, in what order, and what to leave alone. Including the parts we would tell you not to buy.
Plate, powered by CravEngine
You already have what you need to market this place. It is just scattered — the menu somewhere, the photos somewhere else, the customer list in whatever collected it, the hours in three places that disagree.
Plate brings them together into one marketing system. Your menu, prices and hours publish straight to the website we built you. Your photos live in one place, attached to the dishes they show. Your customer list knows who you may actually contact — and your email and text campaigns are built, scheduled and sent from the same screen.
A regional chain has a team for its social, another for its email, another buying its ads. The independent down the street has the better food and an owner doing all three at midnight. We exist to close that specific gap.
Nobody signed a lease because they wanted to learn ad platforms. Every decision here is measured by how little it asks of you — if a system needs you to remember something on a Friday night, it is the wrong system.
Plate does a specific set of things well, and we describe those and nothing else. No roadmap sold as a feature, no automation implied that is not there. If you want to know whether Plate does something, the answer on this site is the real one.
Some restaurants do not need advertising. Some need the website fixed and nothing else for six months. Selling a channel that will not work is how you lose a restaurant in ninety days — we would rather have the awkward conversation first.
No AI-generated food, no stock photo of a dish you do not serve, no made-up review and no invented result. If a photo is missing we tell you which one, rather than filling the gap with somebody else’s burger.
The same shape whether we are running the marketing for you or setting you up on Plate to run it yourself.
What the restaurant is, who comes in, what you have tried, and what you actually want more of.
We go through what you already have — site, listings, social, customer list — and tell you what is worth fixing first.
Your menu, photos and hours into Plate, the website built or brought current, and your customer data in one place.
Either we run the marketing for you, or we show you around Plate once and you run it yourself. Or both.
What worked gets more. What did not gets cut. Menus, seasons and hours change — the system stays current.
Plans and founding restaurant details coming soon — for now, start with a conversation
One short form, or a phone call if you would rather. We will look at what you already have online before we say a word about what it should cost.
Plate
