How Savory Girl Idaho Went From About 60 to 190 Google Reviews for a Catering Company

What is Savory Girl Idaho?

Savory Girl Idaho is a small catering company in Idaho’s Treasure Valley with about seven employees, best known for grazing tables. Owner Robin Cabrini describes a grazing table as a charcuterie “board on steroids”: an entire table filled for a crowd, where a board is something a customer picks up. The company has built tables for up to 300 people, and its largest event fed 350.

Robin sets her tables apart with what goes on them. She special orders melons other caterers do not carry (lemon drop melons at the time of the interview), turns watermelon radishes into roses, and orders cured meats from Europe, where she lived for a long time. Desserts are made in house by the company’s own baker. Warm food, sandwiches and pasta salads were added when customers wanted more than cheese and salami.

How did Robin go from hosting parties to her own commercial kitchen?

By accident at first. Her background is in marketing. While she was home with her kids she threw theme parties and posted the food in her Facebook stories, and friends started asking her to do the same for a cousin’s wedding, a baby shower, a bridal shower. Her husband told her she could not keep doing it from home.

She got licensed and worked out of someone else’s commercial kitchen. Then Channel 6 News, which had seen her work on an Eagle Facebook page, asked to feature her. “This is going somewhere much bigger than I ever dreamed of,” she remembers thinking, and it pushed her to get a kitchen of her own.

She built it without a loan, by working, saving and not taking a paycheck herself. It is licensed as a commissary kitchen, so other small food businesses rent it by the hour, the day or the month. Tenants have included a private chef and, for a few months, a popcorn maker who went on to buy a food truck. Robin does not rent to other charcuterie companies. She and the chef refer work to each other and trade what they know about quantities.

How does a caterer grow with almost no advertising?

Robin has spent less than $100 on Google and Facebook ads in the three years she has been in business. She tracks the source of every booking in her system: referral, website or networking group.

Her explanation is that good catering sells the next job. Guests eat at the table, and one of them books the next event. “Your food alone will get you the next job,” she said. The weekend before the interview her team fed about 500 people, and four more grazing tables were booked for the coming weekend.

A large local circle helps. Robin is from the Treasure Valley, went to college there, and came back after years in Italy, Germany and China.

The website matters more than you might expect for a caterer. A good chunk of holiday business comes through it, including people out of state ordering for family, or a board member sending a charcuterie board to a meeting she could not attend.

What has she learned from watching guests eat?

That people do not eat the vegetables. Robin has been invited to stay as a guest at about a dozen events she catered, and on jobs where her team goes back to clean up, vegetables are most of what is left. She cut back on them, added more of what people do eat, and adjusted pricing to cover a higher quality product.

Savory Girl Idaho is “a little bit more expensive than a lot of the local girls,” she said, and it has not hurt the business at all.

She also learned not to lean on AI for quantities. Once she had worked them out herself, she gave AI the same party size and menu, and its numbers were “way off.”

Why do Google reviews matter to a catering company?

Because Robin would rather rank on Google than pay for ads. She says she is usually in the top three for local charcuterie companies and wants to be number one every time.

Her customers were happy. They mailed thank-you cards and sent texts like “This was the best party.” They agreed to post a review, and then forgot. Handing the job to Review Harvest took her from about 60 reviews to about 190.

Not every review has been five stars. She got a one-star with no comment, tried calling and emailing the customer, and also received a three-star. “It’s no sweat off my back,” she said.

What is her advice to a struggling local business owner?

Know your weaknesses and get other people to fill them. “Show up where you’re strong and fill in where you’re weak.”

Robin has a bookkeeper, a web designer and a service for reviews. Her view is that holding on to money holds a business back, and that spending on the right help brings in more business. She graduated from college in 1995 and can run social media, but websites and reviews are not her strengths, so she does not do them herself.