PlateCravEngine
Restaurant growth services
Social media management, email and SMS campaigns, promotions, customer reactivation, advertising, content and creative, and the restaurant website itself — planned and executed for you.
About
A growth company that only does restaurants.
CravEngine builds and runs the digital side of independent restaurants — the website, the campaigns, the offers, the customer list — and builds the software that makes it possible to do that well for more than one restaurant at a time.
What we are
Two halves of the same company.
Most companies in this space are one or the other: an agency that resells other people’s tools, or a software company that hands you a login and wishes you luck. Being both is the point — the software exists because of what the service work kept running into, and the service work is what keeps the software honest.
Plate
Restaurant marketing software
Our own product. Menu, prices, hours, photos, your customer list and your email and text campaigns — in one place, publishing to the website we built you. We build it, we own it, and we can run it for you.
How this started
It started with one restaurant.
A menu nobody could read
CravEngine came out of building for a Colorado institution that had been feeding people since 1967 and had a website that made it look closed. Great food, real following, multiple locations — and a menu you had to pinch to read on a phone, with catering enquiries going to an inbox nobody opened.
Fixing that was not a design problem. The site was the visible part; the actual problem was that nothing was connected to anything, and that no busy restaurant has the hours to keep six disconnected tools current.
The same four problems, every single time
The website is out of date. The posting stops when it gets busy. The customer list is sitting in a POS untouched. And the tools do not talk to each other. Different restaurants, different cuisines, different towns — same four problems in the same order.
That is why CravEngine is restaurants only. When the problems repeat, you can build for them properly instead of starting from scratch on every client.
So we built the software
Plate exists because the hardest promise to keep is consistency. Anyone can post for a restaurant for a month. Doing it for a year, in that restaurant’s own voice, without repeating yourself, is a memory problem — and memory problems are what software is for.
Plate keeps a record of every post that has gone out, every dish it has covered and everything an owner has told it. That record is why the fiftieth week is still good. It is also the reason CravEngine can take on a restaurant and not quietly get worse at it after the first month.
How we operate
Rules we don’t break.
These are not values on a wall. Each one is here because breaking it is how this kind of company loses a restaurant’s trust.
We work in your accounts, not around them. Your domain, your ad account, your listings and your customer list stay in your name throughout.
We never fake your food. No AI-generated dishes, no stock photo of a burger you don’t serve. A missing photo gets named, not invented.
We never invent a fact about your restaurant. Not a review, not a story, not an off-menu item. If we can’t check it, it doesn’t go out under your name.
We don’t email people who didn’t agree to it. Permission is checked before a send. A burned list does not come back.
We don’t promise covers. Nobody controls that. We control what runs, how consistently, and how fast a bad result gets cut.
We take on a small number at a time. Restaurants are not interchangeable accounts, and this only works if the person doing it knows your menu.
Who’s behind it
Gary Gallardo
Founder / CravEngine & Plate
Gary founded CravEngine in Colorado after years working around independent restaurants — long enough to know that the margins are thin, the hours are brutal, and a website project is the last thing anybody wants to think about at the end of a double.
He builds the client work and writes the software, which is unusual and deliberate: every feature in Plate exists because it came up while delivering for a real restaurant, and every restaurant CravEngine takes on makes the product sharper for the next one.
Straight about this
What we’re not.
You will find companies in this space quoting thousands of customers and millions in attributed orders. We’re early, and pretending otherwise would break the first rule on this page.
Where we actually are
- We are not a big agency. We take a small number of restaurants at a time, on purpose. If you need a hundred-person team and a named account manager, we are the wrong call and we’ll say so on the first one.
- We don’t publish results we haven’t measured. You will not find dollar figures or performance claims on this site, because we will not attach a number to your decision that we cannot stand behind.
- Plate is ours. We built it rather than reselling somebody else’s tool, which means when it needs to change for a restaurant, it changes.
- What we do have is the work. Real restaurants, live sites you can open right now, and software we built ourselves rather than resold. Go and look at both before you talk to us.
Next step
Come and look at the work first.
Two live restaurant sites and a software product you can be walked through. Then decide whether you want to talk to us.