Episode 159 Transcript: Josh Kopel on AI for Restaurant Marketing

The Restaurant Prosperity Formula Podcast, hosted by Dave Scott Peters

David: Hey there, restaurant pros. It’s Dave Scott Peters, and welcome to the Restaurant Prosperity Formula Podcast. For over two decades, I’ve been guiding restaurant owners to success with the proven principles of what I call the Restaurant Prosperity Formula. I originally created the formula based on the daily practices of the most successful restaurateurs I’ve coached, and it’s now the foundation of what I teach restaurant owners like you.

Success is a restaurant owner who dictates the terms of their life and their bank account, instead of their restaurant dictating those things for them. It’s freedom from the restaurant, and the financial freedom they never thought possible. How you define success is up to you, but I know the Restaurant Prosperity Formula is the way to get there.

This season, I’m diving even deeper into the core elements of the formula: leadership, systems, training, accountability and taking action. Along with my insights, you’ll hear from special guests, industry experts and inspiring success stories from restaurant owners who’ve turned their businesses around.

In this episode, number 159, our guest is Josh Kopel. Josh is a restaurateur and marketing expert. Over his 20-year career, he’s owned and operated concepts ranging from dive bars to Michelin-awarded restaurants. His recent focus has been helping independent restaurants use AI to make and save more money.

Listen in as we talk about how restaurant owners can leverage AI to increase sales, and as a bonus, learn how you can get ready-made tools to put this into action right away.

[Sponsor message: Service with Style]

David: Josh, thank you so much for coming back. This is your third time on the show.

Josh: It’s my pleasure. I’m excited to be here for the third time.

David: For those who don’t know how we know each other, I don’t often bring guests back, but you’re one of the few I keep coming back to. We met because you’re out there helping independent restaurants learn how to market, how to make sure their voice is heard, how they separate themselves from the pack, from menu design to catering to sales. More recently, we’ve found we share a lot of the same people. My members who want to get better end up in your world, and your people end up in mine, especially around AI. I’ve got members, including two who are member mentors, who are crushing it with AI, and a lot of that started with your advice. So, what are you doing with restaurant owners and AI, and how are you getting them so inspired?

Josh: I think I really only do two things for a living. First, I clearly define what marketing actually is, because it’s this big, obscure idea. To me, marketing is a single email, a social post, a conversation with a server that shapes how the whole restaurant sells.

Second, I understand what it’s like to be a small business owner, because I was an independent restaurateur myself for close to two decades. The hardest part of that job is being responsible for so many things you’re either not good at or have no interest in. Nobody gets into the restaurant business because they want to be a marketer.

I kept my coaching business small on purpose. I didn’t want a sales team or a room full of marketers under me. I wanted to work directly with clients, which meant a lot of my own time went into it. Then AI came along.

I was in a marketing mastermind with some well-known names in the industry, and one of them, Dan Martell, said something that stuck with me: AI isn’t going to put agencies out of business. Marketers using AI are going to put marketers who aren’t using it out of business. More importantly, it gives an individual business owner the chance to become their own marketing agency.

Before, your options were to spend thousands on a generic agency, or do a mediocre job yourself at two in the morning after a shift. Neither is good. Today, we’re not using AI to do new and magical things. We’re using it to do what we’ve always done, in our own voice, automated and at scale. The real opportunity isn’t mass-produced generic content. It’s hyper-personalized marketing at scale.

I use ChatGPT and Claude the most. They’re each better at different things depending on the week. For example, when I redid the website for davidscottpeters.com, I used to spend $4,000 to $8,000 every time we rebuilt it, with a designer and a whole process. This time, I used Claude and myself. It cost me maybe an extra $100 in tokens, and I think it’s one of the best sites I’ve had. It’s not the flashiest design, but it’s clear, it flows and it converts. Claude walked me through every step, right down to uploading files to WordPress. We still need copy editors and designers for certain things, but for an independent operator, the savings and the quality are incredible.

David: Talk about some of the other ways you’re using AI beyond email and websites.

Josh: There are three phases to the program I teach in my master class, so let me walk through them.

Phase one: brand foundations

Most branding work is performative. Someone hires an agency, gets a brand book after 40 hours of work, and has no idea what to do with it. When I think about brand and digital transformation, I’m talking about making a restaurant a category of one.

Every restaurant has to answer a few hidden questions to turn eyeballs into guests. First: does this place even need to exist? Second: is it for me? Not every concept has to be for everyone, but you need to be clear about who it’s for. Third: how does it fit into someone’s life? Is it a place to get hammered with friends, a date-night spot, a place for a kid’s birthday or a place to celebrate a win at work?

To answer those questions, I use AI to scrape a restaurant’s online reviews and social media engagement, and pull out demographic, geographic, psychographic and economic data. That data becomes the foundation for all the marketing we build.

Search is changing, and most restaurants are invisible to it

A year ago, about 6 percent of all search happened through large language models like Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini. Today it’s around 58 percent. Even restaurants with strong traditional SEO are often invisible to these AI tools, because they’re pulling from different signals.

I built a Claude plugin for myself that asks 10 questions every Monday that a potential client might ask, checks who’s currently being cited by AI tools for those questions, analyzes why, and then writes new blog content and website schema designed to outrank that content. It runs on autopilot every week. I’ve since built a version of this plugin for clients: they answer a short setup questionnaire about their business, and the plugin identifies their key questions and optimizes their website for them automatically, every week, with no ongoing work required.

Phase two: menu engineering

I look at whether a menu is an effective sales tool. First, we benchmark pricing against competitors item by item using AI, which shows exactly how much revenue is being left on the table and how much prices can move up with confidence. I generally believe in being priced at or near the top of the market and making up the difference through marketing and perceived value, not bigger portions.

Second, we look at attachment rates: which upgrades or add-ons customers are already choosing, and where the menu can be restructured to make the better option the default. In one case, we changed a menu default from a single smash burger to a double, since data showed a meaningful share of customers were already upgrading and almost no one would ask to downgrade. In another case, with a juice concept, we used AI to analyze upsell patterns and pushed the upsell rate to 82 percent, just by pairing complementary items at every step. These kinds of changes typically add $2 to $5 in revenue per guest, without added labor or food cost, which can mean tens of thousands of dollars in additional annual revenue.

Phase three: AI-powered catering and outbound sales

Early in my career, I discovered that B2B catering was far more valuable than day-to-day retail sales, since it takes the same effort to sell a $16 sandwich as it does a $600 catering order. For years, prospecting for catering clients was manual: researching nearby businesses, building spreadsheets, making calls.

Now, AI can do that work end to end. An owner can prompt an AI tool to research businesses that fit a target profile near their restaurant, identify the right contacts and rank them by likelihood to buy. Then, by connecting the AI to an email account, it can draft highly personalized outreach messages that sit in the owner’s draft folder, ready to review and send. Since the messages come from a personal email account rather than a mass mailer, they read as one-to-one outreach rather than spam.

David: That solves one of the biggest gaps I see, which is that most independent restaurants have no real outbound sales process for catering. What you’ve described builds an entire prospecting and outreach system without hiring a salesperson.

Josh: Exactly. And because it happens through a personal inbox, it also avoids the deliverability and spam issues that come with mass email tools.

David: Tell listeners about your master class and how they can find you.

Josh: My coaching program is intentionally small since it’s just me working directly with clients. But I want to reach far more restaurant owners than I can coach one-on-one, so I created a free master class. It runs one hour a day over five days and covers everything we talked about today, plus more, including the actual tools, not just high-level advice. People can register at restaurantbusinessschool.com.

The class has three goals for me: show that I know what I’m talking about, prove that these strategies work, and prove they’ll work specifically for the person taking the class. That’s why it runs across five days instead of one. My own biggest fear as a restaurant owner was never going out of business. It was believing there was no solution to my problems. These strategies are the ones that actually worked for me, and I want to make them accessible to others.

I do take on one-on-one clients, but everyone goes through the master class first. I’d rather invest five days in teaching people for free so that if we do work together directly, we’re already aligned and can move fast. The program also comes with a money-back guarantee, and in six years, no one has asked for a refund.

David: If you had to leave listeners with one final thought, what would it be?

Josh: I once heard someone say that every problem in the restaurant industry is a solved problem. Restaurants have existed for thousands of years, so it’s unlikely anyone listening has a truly new problem. Independent owners often don’t have enough time or money to solve things on their own, but the faster path is to attach your problem to a solution that already exists rather than trying to invent one from scratch.

David: Amen. Josh, thank you again for doing this.

Josh: My pleasure, David. Excited to do it again.