restaurant-marketing
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Rachel Ayotte Built a PR Firm by Staying Close to the Table
She started with restaurant floors, a living room and a little over $1,000. Nearly two decades later, Rachel Ayotte is still betting that hospitality marketing works best when it behaves like hospitality itself.
Ada Hu Learned to Make Good Businesses Impossible to Overlook
The NU Media co-founder turned a bicultural point of view into an agency built for brands between worlds. Her next act is less about being everywhere than about helping the right stories travel farther.
Jenifer Kern Is Teaching Restaurant Tech to Think Beyond the Register
The four-time CMO turned a pandemic-era microphone into an industry listening post. Now her argument is simple: restaurants do not need more shiny systems - they need connected data, sharper focus, and a little more empathy.
Morgan Flatley Put the World’s Biggest Menu Back in the Hands of Its Fans
Her cleverest move at McDonald’s was not inventing a new appetite. It was noticing the rituals already hiding in plain sight - then giving a global brand permission to sound like the people who love it.
Andrew Rebhun Built a Career by Taking the Assignment Everyone Else Avoided
From selling a Beanie Baby at the mall to overseeing brand, loyalty and menu innovation at Panera, Andrew Rebhun has made one career bet repeatedly: choose the hard assignment, then make the experience feel human.
Lindsay Radkoski Learned to Market Burgers by Reading the Numbers
She entered Wendy's through investor relations, learned the machinery behind the menu, and emerged as the marketer behind value platforms, loyalty and a very online redhead. Now a 15-year chapter is entering its final stretch.
Brice Gumpel Found a Business in the Empty Chairs
A college food account taught Brice Gumpel what restaurant owners fear after the dinner rush. He turned the empty table into a product, then had to reinvent that product when every dining room closed.
Stella Yu Turned a Food Diary Into a Restaurant-Marketing Career
Before she was marketing restaurant groups, Stella Yu was photographing dinner, filing three blog posts a week and learning how Toronto decides where to eat. Her career shows how sustained curiosity can become operating judgment.
Xavier Leport Is Turning the Pizza Order Into a Growth System
At Pizza Salvatoré and Groupe Abbatiello, Xavier Leport has treated the online order as more than a transaction. It is the feedback loop behind a fast-growing restaurant operation.
Katherine Bond-Debicki Is Teaching an Old Bucket New Tricks
KFC Canada’s marketing chief has spent a decade turning heritage into a working asset - balancing the Colonel, the bucket and 11 herbs and spices with digital ordering, cultural timing and a sharper appetite for change.
Alejandra Gonzalez learned English from Friends and built a career selling chicken across 40 countries
From a bank teller's desk in El Salvador to the marketing chair at KFC's 40-country Latin American business, on a passport full of stamps and a habit of applying for jobs she wasn't ready for.
Noah Chillingworth Knows the Menu Is a Memory Machine
After 32 years marketing food people eat in their cars, Noah Chillingworth has learned that value is emotional, nostalgia is operational, and useful restaurant ideas begin by listening closely.
Abhinav Kapur
He spent his nights doing food deliveries and his days reading equity research. Then he built the software his mother-in-law never had - so every restaurant could remember its regulars.
Jim Williams
Jim Williams is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of MustHaveMenus, a Bend, Oregon-based platform serving 10,000+ restaurants, hotels, and food service businesses with cloud-based menu design, digital signage, and menu management tools. Before MustHaveMenus, he sold email-marketing startup MarketHome to ClickAction for $15 million in 1999, co-founded church-tech platform Sharefaith (acquired by Ministry Brands in 2018), and made an early angel investment in HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb in 2019). An English major who started his first business at age 11, Williams embodies the accidental founder: perpetually optimistic, deeply curious about design, and committed to building software that solves genuinely unglamorous problems.
Adam Dougherty
Adam Dougherty is the co-founder and CEO of Blizzfull, a Glendale, California restaurant-technology company that builds branded websites and online ordering tools so restaurants keep their customers instead of renting them from third-party apps. A USC film-school graduate who crossed over from Hollywood into software engineering, Dougherty channels a self-described obsession with aesthetics into ordering software, an industry not known for good looks. He and co-founder Zach Zurn started Blizzfull around 2011-2012 after struggling to order office lunch, and in 2023 retooled the platform around AI for menu descriptions, marketing suggestions, and one-click website generation.