Koat cuisine

Food & beverage

Short-form video

Social management

UGC

Koat Cuisine is a fast-casual food brand with two physical locations and a growing delivery presence. They made genuinely distinctive West African-inspired food that produced strong word-of-mouth — but almost none of that energy existed online. Their Instagram had 3,100 followers, was updated twice a week at most, and their TikTok didn't exist. Facebook was updated once a month. The food was good enough to go viral. The content wasn't.

Platforms

Date

Sep 2025

koatcuisin

The challenge

Food content is brutally competitive. Every dish on every platform is competing with every other dish on every platform. Koat's existing content was shot on phones, posted without captions or strategy, and had no consistent rhythm. The personality that made the brand magnetic in person — the founders' energy, the theatre of the kitchen, the provenance of the dishes — was completely absent online. The challenge wasn't finding something to say. It was building the system to say it consistently.

Our strategy

We started with a single full-day content shoot: proper lighting, food styling, and close-up macro video across 12 dishes. The output was 60 pieces of content to schedule over 90 days — ending the feast-or-famine posting cycle permanently. For TikTok we built the strategy around the food reveal format: showing the dish being plated, cut, or bitten in the first second. No voiceover. No text until the hook landed. On Instagram, we shifted to Stories-first for daily engagement, with feed posts reserved for hero content. For Facebook, we ran retargeting ads to a lookalike audience built from the existing customer email list. We also ran a UGC activation — offering a free meal in exchange for a video review. Twenty-two customers participated in the first month.

The results

The first TikTok hero video — a nine-second jollof rice reveal — reached 2.5M organic views with no paid spend behind it. The account grew from 3,100 to 19,000 followers across platforms in four months. Table bookings attributed to social increased 67% quarter-over-quarter. The Facebook retargeting campaign achieved a cost-per-new-follower of $0.11 against an industry average of $0.80.