Success Story: Tacolicious
Social Media Meets Mexican Cuisine:
The Story of San Francisco's Taco Titan
Joe Hargrave, 38, longtime San Franciscan, foodist and restaurateur, never expected that the propellants for a long-awaited payday in the restaurant business would be social media and the taco.
Joe had built a name for himself in restaurant circles, first by running city favorites like LuLu, and later opening his own place, the Spanish concept eatery Laiola. The restaurant was hip and critically-acclaimed but couldn't make its numbers. Joe worked to exhaustion.
At last, a trip to Mexico City in 2009 resulted in a turning point, a fateful run-in with Mexican food hero and Top Chef winner Rick Bayless. "I was in shock. Rick Bayless said to me, go get a pad of paper and a pen, I'm going to let you in on the insider track here: contacts, markets, ingredients," explains Joe. "It was so exciting! I decided on that trip that I was going to go back to my contacts at the San Francisco Ferry Building and ask if I could open a taqueria stand during the lunch hour rush."
With that, the upscale Laiola gave way to a pop up called Tacolicious. "The first day, we prepped for maybe 60 people. We opened at 10:00 and by 11:00 had a line 100 people long. I've never failed at anything so bad in my life. People like Tacos!" explains Joe. "By the third week, we did $3,000 in tacos in one day. And it was all being generated by social media: Facebook, Twitter and emailing friends."
The taco stand's success led to a brick and mortar location, which is not only a hotspot among the hip set and local celebrities, but a magnet for foodies who regularly take to the social web to type its praises.
"At first the social media thing was painful to wrap my brain around. But now we can schedule campaigns pretty easily, like choreographing what we want to get out about Cinco de Mayo. We get ideas on what to post, when the best time is to post in a day, and can track who's responding, with the social marketing tool we use," said Joe, who relies on Roost's Social Marketing Platform, which is available for free sign-up at www.roost.com.
"It's invaluable to a restaurant who runs off of word of mouth and social marketing. In just 20 minutes we plan our social campaign for the week, allowing us to constantly engage with our community. It’s amazing, a mad time-saver."
Referring to Roost's Circle feature, Joe says, "The potential of this fascinates me. If I get together with a dozen other businesses I'm friends with and we all market through this system, we can combine our audiences, and all of a sudden my 4,000 person reach can turn into 40,000 people."
A little more than a year after opening the brick and mortar location, Tacolicious has made countless gourmet tacos, $3.5 million in revenue and thousands of taco-happy friends and followers. And with the company’s third location under construction, San Francisco officially ushers in a Taco Titan named Joe.