Ten years ago, if someone were to ask — how to build a successful restaurant? The answer would look like this:
Today, in the sea of restaurants serving delicious food, it’s more than just that. This is, even more, the case for virtual restaurants without a physical storefront, because you’re kind of invisible to the public.
Virtual restaurants need to make their food look pretty, constantly get themselves featured online, and build a strong brand to stand out from the crowd.
Grain is one such virtual restaurant that delivers healthy and tasty meals on demand, meal plans and catering. We have no physical storefront, but own kitchens that can serve thousands every day.
To maximise our resources, we went on to create several virtual food brands. I later launched these brands with little to no marketing budget. There were success and mistakes, and many good lessons to learn (and even more food to eat). Here’s a short review of my experience.
Differentiating the brand
As we were kickstarting a chicken burger brand entirely on food delivery apps, the question to myself was — how do we grab someone’s attention while they’re scrolling through hundreds of food choices without spending money on ads? Well, there were several things we could work on:
And so we did. To differentiate ourselves from other chicken burger brands, I decided to go with a playful brand by the suggestive name of Hot Chick Buns (if you know what I mean). Names of the chicken burgers are cheesy puns under the same theme of love and romance. These are governed by a quick brand guide we created.
Hot Chick Buns got picked up for free by Eatbook and Sethlui. Although we couldn’t dictate what was written, it was good publicity nonetheless, thanks to real delicious burgers by our kitchen team! The Sethlui team even did a video feature!
This brand went from zero to 5 figures in 3–6 months. The business is now paused due to operational issues (delivering the burgers require some sort of ninja skills), but hoping to bring it back soon.
Setting up a strong online presence
Enough of burgers, now let’s talk about our smoked meats brand, Ember Smokery. This brand started off living in the Grain website to gain exposure. However, that wasn’t the best way to rank on Google or run performance ads.
To be able to rank for certain keywords (e.g. smoked meats) and track the success of ads, it’s important to have a dedicated landing page. That’s why we got Ember Smokery a landing page of its own.
Every food brand also needs a Google listing to be discoverable. This HubSpot guide shows you how to get listed.
Getting people to share it on social media
Influencer outreach is one of the best ways to get traction for food brands. I used to only approach food Instagrammers — those who solely feature food and drinks — but I realised these are many more Instagram influencers food brands can tap on.
For example, Tartisan is an artisanal tart brand that serves pretty tarts and unique flavours. It’s perfect for gifts and particularly for females. So besides influencers who focus on desserts, I also shortlisted female influencers who have strong aesthetics that match the look of the tarts.
Giveaways also work well—we recently ran one and that gave us over 2.2k engagement. The key is to make it easy to participate. But of course, that’s only if your objective is to boost engagement and followership. Should you be looking for conversions, that’d be a story for another day!
There’s so much more, but I’ll leave it here and share the rest in other articles. Write to me at sushi.growth@gmail.com if you have any feedback!
