Young Entrepreneur Finds Niche in Restaurant Promotion
By: Jeff Joiner | July 3, 2024
Among many of her former fellow students at UT Dallas, Anisha Holla BS’24 is pretty much a rock star. At least she’s a rock star to those students studying entrepreneurship in the Naveen Jindal School of Management. Holla, who graduated with a degree in psychology from the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, launched an online platform to connect restaurants with food influencers less than a year ago, and already the startup has taken off like a rocket.
“Being in Dallas – which is such a food city – I love knowing that every restaurant and every dish you eat has a story behind it,” Holla said. “That’s the beautiful thing about all these small, local restaurants in Dallas and why I’m passionate about helping them.”
The daughter of immigrants from India, Holla was born in New Jersey and lived for a time in Chicago before her family moved to North Texas when she was in seventh grade. The valedictorian at Centennial High School in Frisco, Holla was a pre-med neuroscience major at UT Dallas before switching her major to psychology because she loved learning about what motivates people. She also has a keen interest in how social media impacts the decisions people make, especially when it comes to food.
Holla started out as a social media food influencer and freelance restaurant critic while still a UTD student. She writes for the Dallas Observer and posts under the Instagram account @dallastx_foodies, which recently surpassed 70,000 followers. But Holla quickly found a heartbreaking side of posting about small, local restaurants, discovering that many independent eateries quickly go out of business due to a lack of exposure. Thus, her idea for FoodiFy.
“It’s essentially a matchmaking platform for restaurants and food influencers,” Holla said. “As an influencer myself, I noticed that social media posts on my Instagram account really affected a restaurant’s business. Almost every time a video I posted went viral, the owner would somehow find me and ask, ‘What did you do? I have a line outside my door that I never had before.’”
Food influencers, or online content creators known for having a loyal social following and specializing in food-based content, visit restaurants and post videos about their experiences. Today social media is a driving force in generating business for restaurants, and influencers are the key to success. FoodiFy uses an algorithm developed by Holla to connect client restaurants with established foodies with large followings and influence as determined by social media metrics.
“As an influencer, I realized how much of an impact social media can have on these small mom-and-pop restaurants,” she said. “It’s often just a quick 15-second video with clips of the food and the ambiance. For many people who are Gen Z, social media is the only way they find new restaurants.”
Holla now represents 25 restaurants in the Dallas-Fort Worth region and works with more than 300 influencers around the country. Restaurants pay Holla a subscription fee based on the level of influencers they work with, and the company, in turn, pays creators for their work, making it a mutually beneficial marketplace. Launched in August 2023, Holla has expanded her startup to Houston, Austin and New York City.
Holla’s first restaurant customer is a great example of the power of the FoodiFy business model. She visited the Brazilian restaurant Casa Pollastro in Addison as an influencer before she had FoodiFy up and running. Her Instagram post and video about the restaurant went viral, and the owner saw an immediate increase in new customers.
“He called me up in tears about what was happening,” Holla said. “He was amazed and was like, ‘I have never seen this many people in my restaurant in my life.’”
Holla knew then she was on to something with her concept for FoodiFy, and the owner signed on as her first customer. Holla arranged for influencers to visit monthly and post about the restaurant, which has experienced continued customer growth since.
Not only are her clients sold on the idea, but established entrepreneurs are too. This spring Holla entered FoodiFy into the student category of UT Dallas’ Big Idea Competition for entrepreneurial startup concepts and won first place, along with $10,000, as judged by guest business professionals. Holla is now using the prize money to hire her first employees.
When asked why she is so fervent about food and helping local restaurants, Holla said that independent restaurant owners are some of the most passionate people about their businesses that she has ever met. They just need a little help finding and growing an audience for their food.
“I just love food and I love meeting restaurant owners and hearing their stories,” Holla said. “We have all these different restaurants with different types of food, different ethnicities and different cultures. It’s so cool to learn the stories behind each ingredient in a dish.”
Holla likes to tell a story about a hidden gem she discovered that is a dessert shop in Garland called Scoop N’ Buns that she describes as looking like a typical ice cream shop and bakery but offers so much more. Holla describes the business as a mix of Mexican and Filipino flavors in all kinds of unique desserts. The owners are a married couple who each brought their own native ethnicity to the business to create a mixture of cultural traditions that Holla describes as a beautiful fusion of flavors.
Another FoodiFy client is Piefalootin, a pie shop in Garland that’s been open for 30 years. Only after hiring Holla and using FoodiFy did the owner start selling out her daily offering of pies. At the same time the owner of a Yemeni coffee shop in Richardson was amazed that customers began showing up at her shop within minutes of a FoodiFy influencer posting about her business. For Holla, FoodiFy is so rewarding because she gets to help all kinds of restaurant owners succeed.
“Restaurant owners are probably the most passionate type of business owners I’ve ever met,” Holla said. “And the reason is because it’s a hard industry to succeed in. If you open a restaurant, you’re doing it because you passionate about it, not because you’re trying to make money because, honestly, it’s usually not that lucrative.”
Holla is now scaling up the business by hiring employees and moving into other markets that Holla has identified as ideal for the startup. She says the model is applicable to any large city in the U.S. where there is a food culture, and she has pinpointed 13 cities for expansion. But Holla said that she’s also interested in international markets and has already been approached by influencers in Tokyo and Bangalore, India, about opening FoodiFy branches abroad.
Word has spread so quickly about the success of FoodiFy that investors are approaching her to buy into the business, though she is reluctant to accept outside money for fear of losing control of her creation.
A fun sideline of her success has been being invited frequently to speak to student entrepreneurs in the Jindal School. Holla said she enjoys talking to students about their ideas for businesses and how to have the confidence to make them a reality.
Holla strongly believes she is doing what she was meant to do and that means helping independent restaurant owners succeed.
“I want to be that person who’s having an impact on their surroundings and having an impact that lasts beyond their lifetime,” Holla said. “I want to be someone who people think of as being a person who helped people. That’s what I love to do and what makes me happy.”