PlateYou already have what you need to market this place.
Plate, powered by CravEngine
It is just scattered. The menu is in one place, the photos are on somebody’s phone, the customer list is in whatever collected it, and the hours are in three places that disagree. Plate brings them together into one marketing system — so the work actually gets done.
Nothing is missing. Nothing is together.
Restaurants rarely lack the raw material for good marketing. They have the food, the photographs, the regulars and the story. What they do not have is one place where those things live, stay current, and turn into something that goes out.
That is the whole job Plate does. It is not a bigger to-do list — opening it should feel like “good, this is handled”, not like another dashboard of tasks waiting for you.
One system, four moving parts.
Everything below is built, in production, and doing this work for real restaurants today. Nothing here is a plan.
Your menu, current everywhere it matters
Sections, dishes, descriptions, prices and the order they appear in. Change a price, preview it, publish it — and the website CravEngine built you updates. No emailing someone and waiting.
Hours that mean hours
Regular hours, plus the real ones: the Monday you close, the holiday, the week the kitchen is being refitted. Dated exceptions, not a note somewhere hoping a person reads it. Address, phone and business details for each location.
Your photographs, in one place, attached to dishes
Stored properly, titled, organised, and connected to the dish each one shows — so the same photograph can be used on the website and in a campaign without anyone hunting for it. Plate also tells you which dishes still have no photograph at all.
Your list — and who you may actually contact
Your customer records in one place, with the thing nobody else tells you: for each person, whether you may email them, whether you may text them, and on what basis. Unsubscribed is not the same as a bad address, and silence is not consent.
Campaigns you build, schedule and send
Build an audience from your list, write from a reusable template, review the exact final content, and send it — email or SMS. Schedule it for Thursday and it goes on Thursday, from the server, whether or not anyone has Plate open. Unsubscribes and suppressions are respected and preserved.
Change, preview, publish
The loop that makes the rest of it worth doing. You change your restaurant’s information in Plate, see exactly what it will look like, and publish it to your site when you are happy. One source of truth instead of a website slowly drifting away from the restaurant.
Change. Preview. Publish.
Three steps, and the reason a Plate restaurant’s website does not go stale. The information a customer reads and the information you keep are the same information, because there is only one of them.
Change
A price, a new dish, a holiday closure, a photograph. In Plate, in a minute, on a phone if you like.
Preview
See exactly what it will look like before anyone else does. Nothing goes out because you clicked the wrong thing.
Publish
It goes live on the website CravEngine built you. Done, and the site is accurate again.
And separately
Build an audience, write the campaign, schedule it. It sends on its own at the time you set.
What Plate is, and what it isn’t.
Restaurant software is a crowded, over-promised category. Here is the boundary, plainly, so you know what you would be getting.
The boundary
- Plate is restaurant marketing software. It exists to hold the things your marketing is made of and to get that work out the door.
- It is not a POS, and it does not replace your ordering or payment system. Whatever you use to take money keeps doing that. Plate does not sit between you and a transaction.
- CravEngine builds the website. Plate keeps it true. The design and the build are ours as a service; Plate is what lets you manage the menu, hours, photos and business information that feed it.
- We describe what is built, not what is planned. Everything on this page is in production. If a capability is not named here, assume Plate does not do it yet — we would rather you found the edges now than after you signed up.
- You never have to run it yourself. If you would rather not open another piece of software, CravEngine can run the marketing for you and use Plate on your behalf.
Run Plate yourself. Or don’t.
Plenty of owners want to keep their own voice and just want the blank-page problem and the scattered-information problem to go away. Others want none of it on their plate. Both work, and you can change your mind.
| You want… | CravEngine | Plate |
|---|---|---|
| Somebody to do the marketing entirely | Yes — this is the whole offer | Not on its own |
| Your menu, hours and photos in one place | We keep them current for you | Yes — you manage them |
| Your website kept accurate | We build it and maintain it | You publish changes to it yourself |
| Email and text campaigns sent | We write and send them | Yes — you build, schedule and send |
| Social media handled | Yes — we manage the account | No — that is service work |
| Advertising and promotions run | Yes | No — that is service work |
| Both — the software, and none of the work | This is the common one. You get Plate; we run it around you. | |
Get Plate for your restaurant.
We will set it up with your menu, your photos and your hours, and show you around it. If you would rather not touch it at all, we can run it for you.