Insights from Avi Goren, Co-Founder & CEO of Marqii, from CraveCon 2025
Filmed live at Crave Con 2025, guest host Josh Halpern sat down with Avi Goren, CEO & Co-Founder of Marqii, to pull back the curtain on a problem most restaurant operators don’t think about enough—until it starts costing them real money.
The way customers find restaurants has fundamentally changed. What used to be about location, signage, and word of mouth has now shifted into a fragmented, fast-moving digital ecosystem. And in that environment, even great restaurants can lose customers before they ever get a chance to serve them.
Restaurants no longer compete just on physical location—they compete on search.
As Avi explains, discoverability today is the digital equivalent of real estate. If your restaurant isn’t showing up accurately—and consistently—across platforms, you’re essentially invisible to potential customers.
“If I’m looking for fried chicken in Houston or coffee in New York, I need to be found the right way.”
The challenge is that the customer journey isn’t linear anymore. It’s not just Google or Yelp. Customers are discovering restaurants through TikTok, influencers, AI tools, delivery apps, and more—all at the same time.
“Seven different ways that people are finding restaurants… it’s not just Google searches… now there’s everything from TikTok and influencers.”
That fragmentation changes the game. It’s no longer about optimizing one or two channels—it’s about being present everywhere your customer might look.
Being “findable” isn’t a competitive advantage anymore. It’s the baseline.
Digital accuracy might seem like a small detail, but it plays an outsized role in how customers experience a restaurant before they ever walk in. At its core, Marqii ensures that listings—hours, menus, photos, and location data—are consistent across every platform, but for most operators this work falls down the priority list as they deal with daily “fires.”
As Avi explains, “every day there’s a new fire… and that top five priority list rotates and changes… we usually sit numbers three to five.”
The problem is that when accuracy breaks, the impact is immediate. A guest showing up to a closed restaurant because hours were wrong, or expecting something different than what’s offered, creates frustration, negative reviews, and lost trust. As Avi puts it, “it’s constantly working in the background”—invisible when it’s right, but painfully obvious when it’s not. In today’s landscape, accurate digital information isn’t optional—it’s foundational to earning and keeping customers.
Restaurants spend so much time optimizing the in-store experience—but the real battle often happens before that. “Getting in is the hardest part.”
Josh breaks down the three key moments in the guest journey—point of desire, point of decision, and point of delight—and highlights where things are falling apart:
“A lot of negative sentiment happens at that point of desire… because they either had misinformation… or something was out of stock.”
If a restaurant loses the customer before they even order, nothing else matters.
The opportunity is to shift focus upstream—owning that first interaction and making sure it’s accurate, seamless, and compelling.
Avi Goren is the Co-Founder and CEO of Marqii, a leading hospitality technology platform focused on helping restaurants manage their digital presence and online reputation. As an original founder of the company, Avi has played a key role in building Marqii into a critical tool for multi-unit restaurant brands, ensuring accurate listings, menu synchronization, and real-time engagement across platforms like Google, Yelp, and emerging AI-driven discovery channels.
With a deep understanding of the evolving guest journey, Avi is focused on solving one of the industry’s biggest challenges: making restaurants more discoverable in an increasingly fragmented digital landscape. Under his leadership, Marqii has expanded its integrations across major POS systems and continues to innovate in areas like analytics, sentiment tracking, and AI-powered competitive insights.
Justin Egan is the Co-Founder of Wing It On! and Vice President of Marketing & Franchise Development at Craveworthy Brands, where he plays a central role in shaping brand strategy, franchise growth, and consumer engagement across the company’s portfolio.
Currently the CBO for Craveworthy Brands and CEO of Big Chicken. Over 20 years of professional and leadership experience in industries ranging from Consumer-Packaged Goods (CPG), to retail and now the restaurant business.
Gregg Majewski has a vast amount of experience as a corporate executive in the restaurant industry. As the former CEO of Jimmy John’s, he played a major role in expanding the franchise from 33 to 300+ stores in just 5 years by surrounding the company’s marketing strategy around the innovative approach of delivering sandwiches and being “freaky fast”. Majewski has worked to develop restaurant concepts over the last two plus decades, before starting Craveworthy Brands in 2023, which currently includes a growing portfolio of restaurant brands. Craveworthy Media is Majewski’s gift back to the industry that has given him so much. The goal of Craveworthy is to inspire the up and coming industry leaders by providing important information, stories, and insights from titans past and present.
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