Kristen Corral started her career as a professional dancer, spent a decade as a Las Vegas showgirl performing alongside Holly Madison and Mel B at Planet Hollywood, and somehow ended up as the founder of one of the most community-driven plant-based restaurant concepts in the country. Tacotarian opened in Las Vegas in 2018, sold out on day one, and has since grown to multiple locations with a CPG line, a franchising program, and a TED Talk under its belt. In this episode, Kristen joins Matt Wampler to share exactly how she builds community, why social media following means nothing without an email list, and how small restaurant brands can out-market the Chipotles of the world by being faster and more human.
What You’ll Hear in This Episode
Why Social Media Is Rented and Your Email List Is the Only Audience You Own Kristen is direct about this. Millions of followers mean nothing if the platform goes dark. Her strategy from day one has been to move people off social media and onto an owned email list using tools like ManyChat to automate keyword-triggered DMs that funnel followers into a subscriber base. She explains how to set it up, what call to action actually works, and why making your email list feel like a club with exclusive early access is what turns a passive audience into repeat customers.
How She Sent One Email and Got 400 Honest Responses One of the best stories in the episode is the email Kristen sent to her entire list asking for unfiltered feedback on the brand. She told them she was a real human being who would actually respond. She got a 50 percent open rate and 400 replies, and some of those responses turned directly into menu changes that made customers feel like they helped build the brand. Her point is that email can be a two-way conversation and that treating it that way is one of the most effective community-building moves a restaurant can make.
Why Tacotarian Never Uses the Word Vegan The positioning behind Tacotarian is deliberate. Kristen does not call it a vegan restaurant because the word vegan has become polarizing and turns away the exact customers she is trying to reach, which are the flexitarian majority who want healthier food but are not committed to a label. She explains why most plant-based restaurant concepts fail, and it comes down to this: they only market to the 3 percent of people who already identify as vegan. You cannot run a restaurant on 3 percent.
How AI Is Leveling the Playing Field Against the Chipotles of the World Kristen makes a counterintuitive argument that small restaurant brands can actually beat large chains on marketing right now. Chipotle has to run every idea through layers of approval and has no real relationship with their customers. A small operator with ChatGPT, Perplexity, and a segmented email list can move faster, test more, and speak more personally to their audience than any corporate marketing team. She uses AI daily for research, speech prep, copywriting outlines, and customer data analysis.
Segmenting Your Email List and Why Sending Less Is Sending Better Kristen walks through how she uses Klaviyo to segment her audience into 30-day, 60-day, and 90-day openers and sends more frequently to the engaged segment and less to the disengaged. The goal is to speak to the people who want to hear from you rather than exhausting people who are barely interested. She describes this not as a marketing tactic but as basic respect for the relationship.
The CPG Pivot and What She Learned Going Direct to Consumer Tacotarian recently expanded into consumer packaged goods, and Kristen is candid about what she got wrong first. She started in 37 grocery stores and lost money on every unit because of the margins the broker and retail chain extracted from the price. She pivoted entirely to direct-to-consumer and sold more on Black Friday weekend than in the previous three months combined. Her lesson is that DTC lets you keep the relationship with the customer, control the margin, and use your social and email audience as your distribution channel.
What Her TED Talk Was Actually About Kristen gave a TED Talk on how to save the world with tacos, which is really a talk about how to turn customers into raving fans by building real community. She rehearsed it 200 to 300 times for an eight-minute talk. She talks about what the experience was like, why she was terrified despite a decade of performing on stage, and what she wanted restaurant founders to walk away understanding about the relationship between community and long-term brand survival.
Key Topics Covered
- How to convert social media followers into an owned email list
- ManyChat automation for keyword-triggered DM funnels
- Email segmentation using Klaviyo for restaurant brands
- Why plant-based restaurants fail by marketing only to the 3 percent
- How small brands can out-market large chains using AI tools
- Using ChatGPT and Perplexity for trend research and copywriting
- Community-driven marketing and the humanization of restaurant brands
- Direct-to-consumer CPG strategy and why grocery store margins will kill you
- Building a franchise-ready CPG supply chain through co-manufacturing
- Giving a TED Talk on building community through restaurants
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