Inside Chowly’s Acquisition of Koala: How Chowly Used Media Relations to Build Trust

Chowly, the original provider of third-party marketplace POS integration services for restaurants, made a bold move in early 2023 by acquiring Koala, a guest experience platform. While Chowly already integrates orders from the industry’s largest platforms like GrubHub, Uber Eats and DoorDash, the acquisition further provides a full-stack solution that empowers restaurants of all sizes to optimize their operations, drive revenue growth, and enhance their customer experience. 

Chowly’s mission is to simplify technology for the restaurant industry nationwide – enabling restaurateurs to expand and maintain their off-premise capabilities. Even though the Chowly platform is currently used by 12,000+ restaurants across the country, the company recognized the need to offer a more comprehensive solution that helps restaurants navigate today’s complicated digital world. Enter Koala: Known for delivering a premium ordering experience to scale, it is a trusted partner for more than 40 brands with over 4,000 restaurants served. 

To drive awareness around the acquisition, Chowly partnered with Idea Grove to develop a media relations campaign that could help increase brand visibility and trust with Chowly’s target audiences. In order to garner positive press coverage, we aligned with Chowly on a clear, concise message that illustrated the strategic rationale for the acquisition and what benefits it will bring to the company, its customers and stakeholders. 

To ensure that the acquisition announcement was effectively communicated, we then developed outreach materials to share with our target media outlets – including a detailed press release and several custom pitches. The press release was distributed on Business Wire for national amplification and the PR team reached out to Chowly’s list of trade media and national restaurant reporters, pitching journalists the acquisition story and offering interviews with Chowly executives.

By executing a well-planned media relations campaign, we were able to successfully announce the acquisition as well as effectively manage the narrative around Chowly’s latest company news – further achieving the company’s strategic business objectives and setting the foundation for a promising integration. 

Over the course of several weeks, the PR team secured six pieces of coverage with approximately 2.45M estimated views. Key media outlets that featured the acquisition news included Hospitality Technology, Restaurant Technology News, and QSR, to name a few.  

Additional key results include:

• 36 syndicated articles featuring the acquisition announcement  

• Nearly 100 press release link clicks from readers 

• An average domain authority of 55*

*The domain authority is a search engine ranking score of 0-100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking.

Through a combination of media relations tactics, our PR efforts surrounding this strategic acquisition proved to be an effective tool for enhancing brand reputation and trust, generating positive media coverage, and reinforcing Chowly’s position as a leader in the market.