Facebook Group Helps Lakewood Restaurants

Press release from Capitol Partners: After working for years as a chef and in distribution for the restaurant industry, when Ohio announced that restaurants would be closing on March 16 th , Sarah Sherepita knew she had to do something immediately.

She thought that if she could promote restaurants through Facebook, she could help the entire
industry, from the supply chain to the restaurant itself. She talked about the idea with one of her co-workers, Brad McLaughlin, and they took to social media and created two Facebook groups:

• Cleveland Restaurant Take Out, a public group that had over 5,000 members within hours of creating the group. It now has close to 12,000 members.
• Lakewood Lives for Take Out, a private, community based group to support Lakewood restaurants.

“The pandemic impacted everyone I know,” says Sarah. “Most folks in this industry live paycheck to paycheck. You have servers who only know this way of life. The industry, and it’s people, are completely overwhelmed.”

Facebook Groups became a support for restaurant patrons and the owners and community employed by these restaurants. Instagram recently launched a build-out of features for patrons to order food and buy gift cards directly from the app. Instagram now has “Food Orders” and “Gift Card” stickers for Stories and a button for restaurant’s business profile page. Each time someone sees IG Stories with these stickers or goes to the IG profile page, they can tap through to complete a purchase.

Sarah hopes that these tools will continue to assist the restaurant industry during this time.
She says, “restaurants that are succeeding right now are implementing a takeout model and are
using social media.”

This press release was produced by Capitol Partners. The views expressed here are the author's own.