It started on Instagram

In 2019, Dan Burkard and Michelle Carilli co-created the Instagram account @wickedtasty in Nashville. Reaching 10,000 followers by the end of 2020 the page became one of the largest and fastest growing food blogs in Music City.

The @wickedtasty brand was built to highlight and showcase the great diversity of food & drink in central Tennessee. No corporate chains. No national brands. The brand's mission was to feature only locally owned & operated restaurants.

Quickly, they saw a way to leverage their platform, photography and social media skills to help the local restaurant community.

A pandemic pivot

In early 2020, the team at @wickedtasty was preparing to launch a social media and photography business in Nashville to help local restaurants leverage their online presence. Only two weeks before their planned launch the entire country shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Small businesses, especially restaurants, bars and retail were hit hard in Nashville. With many businesses just trying to figure out how to survive, services like photography and social media management went to the back of the priority list.

The team was forced to re-evaluate their plan and make a pivot to not only help restaurants survive COVID, but thrive as the industry began it's long climb back.

Back in business

When restaurants began re-opening for in-house dining in late Spring of 2020, nearly every restaurant in Nashville adopted touch-less QR menus.

Guests quickly adapted to the new technology but the team @wickedtasty spotted a major flaw with digital menus: PDF files or website menus were not designed to be viewed on an iPhone. The menus were hard to read and required guests to do a lot of pinching, zooming and scrolling.

While drinking Mai Tais the team @wickedtasty saw an opportunity to both improve the guest experience and help restaurants better leverage this new technology by putting pictures on digital menus.

That's when MENU by @wickedtasty, the better menu, was born!