Brand Case Study:
Eight dinners, eight sellouts, first season
How a wood-fired farm kitchen in Waldoboro stopped calling itself a caterer and filled its long table.
Brand Strategy Foundation (Competitor Audit, Personas, Insights, Positioning, Brand Platform)
Voice & Messaging
Website Copy
Marketing & PR Strategy
Social Media Strategy
Experience Design
Merch / Swag
The situation
Applecroft is 100 acres on Route 1 in Waldoboro, Maine. The chef cooks over a wood fire with ingredients from within 20 miles, and guests don’t see the menu until they sit down.
Its reputation had been built one wedding at a time, and the word it used for itself was “catering.” That word implies a vendor: you tell them what you want, they execute it. It was the opposite of how they work, and it kept Applecroft talking only to couples as a traveling caterer, when the bigger plan was a venue people would drive to Maine for and host their wedding.
What we did
Our platform work started with the thing guests kept describing but nobody had named: presence. No menu to preview, no reliable signal in the cabins, a fire that asks you to sit around it. Applecroft builds those conditions on purpose. When we read the brand story back to the team, the response was “YES, that’s us.”
Four pillars came out of it: Fire, Presence, Trust, and Roots. We gave Applecroft a vocabulary to replace “catering” (“culinary partner” and “food-forward farm venue”), key messages for weddings, cabin stays, and dinners, and a voice guide built to sound like them, scenic route included.
Then we put it to work on the Kitchen Garden Dinners. A social strategy tied every post to a pillar, timed around dinner week, and widened the feed beyond weddings to food-forward travelers. We added PR and built a partnership with Edible Maine, plus email and the experience design for the dinners themselves.
What changed
100,000 new views and a 55% increase in Instagram followers in four months.
All eight Kitchen Garden Dinners sold out by week 3.
Partnerships and features with Edible Maine, Maine Life, Lincoln County News, The Maine Menu Co, Traveling Mainers.