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The Restaurant Roadmap is your guide to building and running a successful restaurant. Each episode explores the full journey of operations—from planning and development to menu design, execution, and growth. Hosts Danny Bendas, Amanda Stokes, and Chef Eric Lauer bring decades of expertise, joined by industry leaders and restaurant professionals who share their insights and stories. Together, they uncover strategies, tools, and lessons that help operators improve performance, strengthen teams, and elevate the guest experience. Whether you’re opening your first location or refining an established brand, The Restaurant Roadmap equips you to navigate every step with confidence.
Danny: Welcome to The Restaurant Roadmap podcast, powered by Synergy Restaurant Consultants, your go-to source for actionable insights and real-world strategies from the industry’s top experts, clients, and special guests. Whether you’re building a new concept or refining an existing one, we’re here to help you create a forward-thinking sustainable brand, elevate guest experience, streamline operations and maximize your bottom line. With decades of hands-on experience, our mission is simple: to deliver practical, proven solutions to the everyday challenges restaurant operators face. Let’s dive in and get to work.
Danny: Welcome everyone to The Restaurant Roadmap podcast powered by Synergy Restaurant Consultants. I am delighted to have a special guest with us today, Vince Wang, who is the co-founder and CMO of Mustard Love. And we want to talk today about how we can help build sales and we can do that by bringing on influencers into your business. I want to introduce Vince. Say hello, Vince, tell us a little bit about yourself, and then we’re going to move right into some content here. We got a lot of great stuff to talk about.
Vince: Sounds good. Thanks, Daniel. My name is Vince Wang, and I’m the CMO of Mustard as Danny alluded to. And love to talk more about influencer marketing. Really, we founded Mustard.Love as a platform for restaurants to really get attention in the world. We started in 2022 and since then, we’ve grown to 175,000 creators and over 1000 restaurants at this point.
Danny: Wow. And you’re national and international, correct? Or not, international?
Vince: We are. We’re currently in the US, Canada, and in the UK.
Danny: Very cool. All right, so restaurants are facing a lot of problems today, so let’s talk about that. What are they facing? Give us some background and what you’ve seen as you’re promoting your business.
Vince: Yeah, a lot of restaurants nowadays are, don’t k—have already worked with influencers in the past, and they’ve kind of tri—dabbled in it, but they haven’t been consistently doing it. So, one of our ways is we made it super easy for restaurants to come in and be able to repeatedly use influencers as a form of marketing channel. So really, we know, like, influencers come in, they eat, they post it to the followers, but in the world, we have 175,000 influencers out there. It’s deciding who to choose, to pick, to use, how much do they cost, all of that, those are unknown factors, and so our platform really lets a lot of restaurants decide, like, hey, here are the ones that are effective, we’ve worked with in the past. Using AI, we can choose exactly the ones that will work for you.
Danny: I don’t know how new influencers are, old influencers are, but it sounds a little bit intimidating, I think, sometimes to people, you know, influencers. So, you know, how does that work and how do you put—as you’re talking to people about influencers, how do you put people at ease in terms of how it works, what they do, you know, the type of influencer, and stuff like that? And if I’m getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, that’s okay. We, you know, we like to kind of recreate things as much as we can. So, explain how influencers, what they are, how they work if you wouldn’t mind.
Vince: Yeah, so there’s really how we classify as two types of people. There’s creators, which we allude to, are types of people that tend to come in and eat and create content. Influencers really are the ones with some sort of reach and have high followers. How we define it is, we have nano-influencers that are roughly around 10,000 followers. We have micro-influencers that are higher and so forth, and then we have celebrity influencers that are over a million followers. So, that’s how we define the wording there.
How it works is, usually it’s you have your customers, I mean, they could potentially be influencers, your customers that come into your restaurants if they have high enough volume. You just don’t know. Or even the original influencers, which are the food critics that [laugh] come in and review your restaurants. They’re the OG influencers. And so, these are just different forms. They come in, they eat, they review your restaurant, and if they like it, they’ll post the content. And if their followers—or audience—decides that the amazing food and product, they’ll come in and attract new customers to your restaurant.
Danny: Very good. You know, I didn’t really think about restaurant critics being influencers, but I guess they are. Just not in the context of, sort of, how we’re talking about it today, right? So, if you had to sum up Mustard Love in one sentence, how would you do that? What would that sentence be?
Vince: Just like how Uber revolutionized the taxi cab business, we are kind of the marketplace, the Uber for influencers, for restaurants. We made it super easy. Someone can just go in, pay a fee, and use our platform. Influencers show up, they’ll post it, and we’ll track all the results, including how much views, how much engagement, how much foot traffic came in. And also, if there’s an integration involved with the POS system, we can also track how many customers uplift.
Danny: All right, so what’s the advantage? What’s the benefit for operators to use something like their influencers and obviously someone like you to help find the right one because that’s really the trick, right, what are the right ones? So, how does it help?
Vince: Yeah, one of the most important factors is really local influencers. So, there’s a lot of influencers out there. I mean, there’s celebrities with a million followers, but none of it’s relevant if your restaurant is in Los Angeles and you’re reaching followers in another state. Ultimately, you want the critics or whoever, the influencers to come in to be at a local market. And that’s where really the technology plays is we pick influencers, number one, that are local to you, that are going to come in and have a local following, number one.
Number two is really the content that they generate. Unlike ads, where it’s like a one-time thing, you go on TV and play, the content the influencers generate actually sits on the social network and is able to continually feed new views every single month. For one case where we had a case study, we saw—Sushi By Bou is one example—in three months time, they saw 3x ROI with the number of ads that they did, and because they didn’t even with the same piece of content, they saw, over the course of a year, about 12x ROI. And so, that piece of content just continually generated traffic as time progressed.
Danny: And then you get to—you meaning the operator—you work with them? They work with you on finding the right influencer that gives you the right message what you want to say, correct? So, that they’re the operators engaged in this entire process.
Vince: Exactly. There’s two ways. So, our platform does two things is some operators are more hands off, and they can start a campaign, and we would use AI to completely run their campaign for them, including picking the influencers, the type of content that they want to talk about, we would scan their online ad and looking at the historical content message of the influencers themselves, and kind of relays that, okay, if you their messaging is more about, like, Chinese restaurants, for example, and they do it a certain way, we just relay that sort of filming creative direction with the operator. The other option is a more manual process because certain operators want, like, oh, I want to highlight a certain menu item that is really relevant to what I do, or there’s, like, a new—I just want, like, a new opening that I want someone to come in. And so, that’s a more manual operating way to say I want specific types of influencers that highlights my new opening or new menu items.
Danny: And so, once we find the influencer, and then just to carry the process forward a little bit, you know, the influencer is the one that does the work, creates the ad, does the videos, but it’s all centered around what the operator really wants them to focus on. Is that right?
Vince: Exactly, yeah. Ultimately, I think of [laugh] the operator, as the creative director. They decide how they want to run it, they’re the director of their film or the piece of content that the influencer is coming. And the influencers are just there for the reach and film it how they want it.
Danny: So, very hands-on, very directive, and really focused on what they want to promote, which I think is important because, you know, whether it’s a holiday, a special, the food special, whatever that is, they control the destiny of what the message is going to be, you know, obviously, to their benefit, if that’s what they want to do, and they kind of turn the influencer loose and let them make it happen, right?
All right. So, let’s talk about some results here because, you know, everybody wants to know about results, right? So, you gave us some case studies here. I’m just going to ask you to kind of go through those a little bit. I do want you to toot your horn because we, as consultants in our business, we’re agnostic, you know? We’re not promoting Mustard Love because we, Synergy, get anything out of it. We’re promoting it because we want to help our clients, and the best way for people to understand that is to show the value. Why don’t you go through some of these case studies you gave us, so people can understand what the benefit can be for something like this because I think it’s really profound and can really help your volume, which everybody’s struggling with today. So, go ahead, Vince.
Vince: Yeah, we have a couple of case studies. Generally, the high-level strengths are really repeatability, I believe. Just banking on a single influencers is not going to work, so we at Mustard Love really focuses on three influencers per month at a minimum. It’s really about reach because of what we see, like, in the marketing field is if someone sees three different people promoting saying your food is good, that’s a lot better than one person saying it. That’s first. And so, most of these cases are repeatability, and then over time.
I think a lot of restaurant operators, they say, oh, one piece of content, and then they expect the, I call it the Oprah effect, [laugh] like, this huge spike of customers just showing up the next day. That’s really not the case for a lot of our case studies. It takes at a minimum one month. I mean, the influencers need time to film and show and then we see a trickle of customers come in, especially when it takes three influencers. And so, by month two, you should see a small spike, and then month three is just the bigger spike as the number of content builds and the number of customers start to see the content that’s produced. Sushi By Bou and Sin City Burger are some of the examples. They saw 3x ROI in 90 days, and then over a year, 12x ROI. And it continues to do that with our 700 restaurants that are on our platform.
Danny: So, I guess, you know, again, this, like any advertising or marketing, you have to create a cadence and a flow to stay out there in front of people. It’s not a one-and-done kind of a thing, right?
Vince: That’s exactly right, yes.
Danny: All right, so why would you say that you’re better than just, you know, a normal influencer market. What are your advantages?
Vince: Yeah, the main thing is we are specialized in localized marketing. That’s something none of our competitors do. And so, there’s a lot of logistics that’s really involved when it comes to localized. Similar to Uber, the infrastructure needs to show up on time, they need to post by a certain timeframe, they need to do certain things to go from A to B. While any other platform are more focused on e-commerce, a lot of the logistics that’s getting influencers to come in is not there.
Danny: Well, did you create the environment to make it easy for them to find the right people, right, the right influencers to target their business the way they want their business to be viewed, you know, by the potential consumer, right? Versus, I mean, how else would you find an influencer, right? So, you have quite a stable that you can help choose the right one.
Vince: That is an excellent point. So, that’s only one challenge. Finding the influencers is, I believe a lot of our competitors are already doing that. Anyone can see that influencers easily accessible online, but it’s really how to scalably do it because, like, who are the good influencers versus who are the ones that are not local, for example, or who are the ones that are really—when we work with that has generated ROI? On top of that, a lot of operators that haven’t done influencer marketing, that don’t understand the challenges of just getting the influencers just show up.
Because a lot of times these influencers are not professionals. I read a report, the average influencer makes about 30k a year, so it’s a side gig for a lot of them. Biggest issue is a lot of times, they might come not follow your direction the way—not because not perfe—not follow directions, or they don’t post, or they don’t show up on time. And so, these are just, I mean, imagine as a restaurant owner, you were trying to run a restaurant, you’re, like, prepared for the influencer, and they don’t show up, which is the biggest pain. So, a lot of what we do is really professionalizing that process, making sure they show up, they post, and then on top of that, tracking the results, which, if you were to do it yourself, it’s extremely hard.
Danny: Well, that’s really good, you know because, to your point, I think that’s an excellent point. Restaurant operators want to operate restaurants, right? They don’t want to be marketing experts, so if they can find somebody to turn it over to and just give the direction and the guidance, that makes it a lot easier. Do you vet the influencers that you post on your site? I assume there’s some approval process that you put them through, right?
Vince: A hundred percent. There’s really two ways of vetting. We vet them and the operators vet them as well. So overall, it’s the influencers we have, if we have a lot of history because we are a marketplace, we tend to measure if influencers have done other business with us. And the operators themselves, on our dashboard, can see exactly okay, how has this influencer performed in the past? Did they show up on time? Did they post on time, things like that. And then, from a restaurant operator’s perspective, they can also look at the influencer themself and say, “Oh, I don’t want to work with this influencer because of A, B, and C.” It’s ultimately a two-sided vetting system.
Danny: Cool, that also is a huge advantage because then I have more comfort that I’m going to get what I want when I want it and it’s going to be effective. So, tell me about your $99 self-service plan because I think that would be a potential, really interesting, you know, initial point of entry, if you will, right, to get somebody who’s not sure, doesn’t have a big budget. You know, that’s an interesting plan. Why don’t you tell us about it?
Vince: Yeah, so we launched a recent plan. We’re trying to lower the barrier of entry for a lot of our customers is that we have a managed plan, which is currently on our website at three influencers for $$299, and then the self-service plan is more about going in and being more hands-on for the operators themselves, by lowering costs, they would just go in view all the number of influencers that they want, invite the specific ones that they want, or run a campaign, and our software would handle all the logistics involved. So, if they like a particular influencer, they would just invite them, and then the influencer, they would just pay per influencer, in this case, $25 per creator booked. And so, if they really like one, they pay $25, the creator comes, and we track everything for them.
Danny: And then if you really want to go crazy, you can do your $299 managed service plan. That sounds like sort of the Mac Daddy, where you don’t have to do as much, right? So, how does that work?
Vince: A hundred percent. So, similar to our technology, we actually from the managed plan, we have a support team where you can chat with and say, hey, I don’t understand this. What’s going on this? It’s more of, like, an agency model at scale. I know that the $299 is a relatively good price, and so it’s more of a hands-on for, like, a scalable agency. And we guarantee the three influencers that are going to be showing up, while the self-service, we don’t guarantee it.
Danny: This is just a curiosity question, but for that price, is there a tier of influencers, or you still pick whatever influencer you’re comfortable with? I guess, in terms of talent, you know, how many people are following that influencer? Does that change as the prices change? I’m just curious.
Vince: Yeah, pricing does not change. So, we like to see it as a tool and dependent on how we operate is a little bit different. So, we don’t really say, oh, the celebrity influencers cost this much; the lower influencers cost this much. We’re more like a job board. So, think of us as we would send the job description, I’ll say, “Hey, I’m restaurant ABC. Who’s interested in coming in and doing a video for us?” And then the influencers apply.
So, this can even be a big influencer, small influencer. It really depends on the offer itself. We’ve had big influencers—well, big following influencers, around more than million even—apply to come into a really well-known restaurant. So, it depends on the offer and the restaurant itself. And then it’s all about them coming in. So, at the end of day, it’s the platform can access to all sorts of influencers. It really depends on the offer itself.
Danny: Very good. And I think the thing that is really good is that, you know, you’re providing a lot of feedback to the to your customers, a lot of data and stuff like that to really help them learn what did they get, and it leads to potentially improving the way they do things, right? So, let’s talk about the data layer a little bit. That’s I think really, really, really good.
Vince: The first level is really tracking the post themselves, how much reach it is, how many people actually saw the post. And then the next layer is really about the number of visits that the post has reacted to, and then, and the most important metric, of course, is how much revenue each post generates. So, a lot of it is really analytics layer that we tacked on for each post. And given all this data, especially if you work with many, many creators, you can see exactly which creator is most impactful for your particular restaurant. Because, you know, it’s very unique.
What we saw is very interesting, is even some of the micro-influencers because they have such niche following and such local following, that they tend to even have better ROI than the celebrity ones because of the local reach, or just the way they present their content is a lot better for the restaurant. One example is say, like, influencer that lives in a very specific area, like, a specific part of the city, they and a lot of their followers are people from that zip code itself, they’re going to attract a lot more customers and revenue for that restaurant than someone that’s, I don’t know, 45 miles away, where the followers are generally a lot further. And so, a lot of what we see is each post and influencers are very different for the restaurants themselves. I wouldn’t say, like, oh, this influencer is great for this restaurant; you just have to test it out and see, and measure exactly who it is. And once you have that, the most important part is to be consistent. Once you identify who these top influencers are, you continue to work with them, track them, and then find others just like them, and our platform lets you do that.
Danny: Hey, I have another question for you. In your opinion, you know, if I have a certain amount of money, I can spend, you know, a lot of restaurants, 3 to 5% of sales, you know, is their marketing budget, right? So, do influencers add to or potentially really replace other marketing that you may be doing, in your opinion?
Vince: I think we need to think of influencers as less about advertising, more about operational because it’s a consistent form of revenue if you consistently do it right, and our platform lets you do it. A lot of times when restaurant operators come in and they do it once, they might see a small spike in foot traffic, but then they just don’t have the time to consistently do it. So, that’s what we’re saying is that, yeah, they’re spending on ads they do it once, but if they keep doing it on a monthly level, they can continue to see that revenue trend. And when revenue becomes, like, a line item as an operator, you’re going to consistently spend. It’s like food cost. In this case, it’s influencer cost.
Danny: So, I mean, it can either add to or potentially you could slow other things down if this is more effective. So, you can kind of manipulate your budget, your marketing dollars, and you can track what’s successful, which I think is really good because otherwise, you know, it’s like throwing money out of a helicopter. You don’t know where it’s going to land, right, so at least this gives you the ability to really track it.
Vince: Yeah, that’s really the most important part. I believe, when you first start, it’s a lot like that, right? You’re kind of throwing money [laugh] out there and seeing what sticks. Our platform gets you the feedback systems, like, hey, this is sticking or this is not sticking, depending on the influencers and the concept. And once you see something sticks, you just keep going at it.
Danny: So, what does the future look like? How does this—you know, is there AI involved? How does this work, to kind of sum things up and close things out?
Vince: I think there’s a couple of things that are going to happen. It’s our platforms can get smarter with new, additional AI tools that are going to be introduced. So, we’re going to have an AI assistant where, if restaurants say, hey, using the history of the influences come in that produce content is this assistant is going to come and say, hey, I recommend you do this; do that. For example, if a shot that talks about ice cream or certain desserts that was really appealing, versus, like, a food item that was less appealing, then the system will say, hey, you should do more desserts because that’s a lot of your—our comments are really engaged on this particular menu item. It’s more to, like, kind of replace the agency aspect.
We’re using AI where it has that feedback loop. On top of it, there’s a lot going to be a lot of AI-generated content that’s going to be coming out. Unfortunately, that’s not currently legal. You can’t really replace a person, but I think it’s starting to become like that, and for the future. And so, there’s going to be AI-assisted content generation. So, if influencers come in and you see a lot of—and you have, like, ten pieces of content that you produce, you can essentially even stitch them all together and make a new piece of content that way.
Danny: Okay, so using old information to recreate it is what you’re saying?
Vince: Exactly, and then that way it’s still authentic and it’s really relevant to what you were doing, but you’re using a lot of this—you’re repurposing the content. And that’s something like I will allude to that, it’s a little bit more huge advantage versus just pure advertising is that you also not only getting influencers for reach, but you’re also getting so many pieces of content that’s localized at the places that you want to film, and you can reuse for future purposes.
Danny: Or, like you said, you can parse different elements together, and you’re creating something new out of something you’ve already done. I think that’s really cool. So, why don’t you quickly, is there anything else you’d like to add, and then tell us how people can get in touch with you. I put your email up there on the screen for people to write down, but verbally, in case somebody is not watching, they’re listening, how does someone get in touch with you to see how something like this might work for them?
Vince: Where our website is very apparent, all of our pricing is physically available on our website at www.mustard.love that’s L-O-V-E with Mustard. The best way is to go on our website, book a call if you want to speak with someone or just try us out. Essentially, we have the self-service plan $99, and pretty soon, we’re also working on another project where we have a free demo for a lot of people that are coming in. So, just go to the website and see what we’re building next.
Danny: Okay, very good. So again, www.mustard.love. I’ve spent some time looking on the site and again, these are things that we like to bring to our clients or our listeners to help them in this tough age of business revenue generation and stuff like that. So Vince, I want to thank you very much for helping us out today. This has been really great. If anybody has any questions or would like some additional information, or if you’d like to know how to get in touch with Vince, you can email us at info@therestaurantroadmap.com, and also give us other information about content, things you might want us to talk about. And we are going to be releasing, in January, an email if you submit a question and we talk about it on one of our next podcasts, we’re going to provide you with a free 30-minute consultation.
If you did that and you wanted more information about influencers, we would certainly reference you to Vince directly in his business because I think there’s a lot of opportunity here. So, once again, feel free to reach out, love to help. Vince, thank you again. This has been a really, really good, really informative time spent together. We’ll talk to you soon. Thank you again, Vince.
Vince: Thank you so much.
Danny: Thanks for tuning in. We hope today’s episode gave you valuable insights you can put into action. If you have questions, want more info on today’s topic, or need support with your restaurant-specific challenges, we’d love to hear from you. Reach out anytime at info@therestaurantroadmap.com, and visit synergyrestaurantconsultants.com to explore our services, sign up for our newsletter, and catch up on past episodes. Don’t forget to follow and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook so you never miss what’s next. Do you have feedback or a topic you’d like us to cover? Contact us. We’re here to help make the world a better place to eat.