Alonso Castañeda is VP of Brand Development & Strategy at Savory Restaurant Fund, an arm of Mercato Partners that focuses on delivering outsized returns through strategic growth and replication strategies. He leads the strategic oversight of brand initiatives, brand campaigns, and implementation of customer-facing systems that enhance the experience for their fast-growing consumer-facing brands. During his career, he has specialized in taking fast casual and polished casual food and beverage concepts and scaling them into 50-unit+ powerhouse brands.

Curry Up Now founder Akash Kapoor has been a self-employed entrepreneur and businessman since childhood. His first business dates back to grade school movie nights, where he set up a food stand, and has successfully grown a variety of businesses, from credit card marketing to mortgage banking to debt and tax mediation. In 2009, he left the traditional business world to start Curry Up Now with his wife, Rana. Curry Up Now was the first Indian street food truck in the Bay Area, and has since grown to include three food trucks, two craft cocktail bar concepts called Mortar & Pestle within Curry Up Now, and seven brick-and-mortar locations. Curry Up Now has franchise locations in Atlanta, Sacramento, Southern California, Salt Lake City & Hoboken with dozens more planned nationwide.

Harold Walters Co-Founded an emerging Hawaiian fast casual concept called Shootz in 2019. Completely bootstrapped, Shootz opened the doors of a 600 square foot location in Southern California in September of 2020 during the height of the pandemic. After serving over 90,000 meals out of that location, Harold has overseen Shootz expansion into 3 locations within 18 months. Harold has a gift for technology and internet marketing. He has pioneered change in the fast casual space by implementing high-level front end and back end marketing strategies he developed while he ran several bootstrapped ecommerce businesses. In addition to Shootz, Harold Co-Founded a fast-casual restaurant, Buenos Migos in fall of 2021 and a cookie shop, Sweet G’s in spring of 2022.

Caroline Keros is a Senior Account Executive at SOCi and is responsible for partnering with SOCi’s restaurant clients to help empower them to scale their marketing efforts across all digital channels. Caroline's background includes 20 years of digital marketing experience working across restaurants, retail, financial services and healthcare industries. She was most recently the CMO and President Social Media Management for IntelliShop, an industry leader in customer experience and survey management, working with brands such as Jack in the Box and Bojangles . As a marketing leader, Caroline fully understands the demands and pressures brands face to drive profitable sales and ensure that messaging is communicated effectively on both the national and local levels. She is dedicated to helping brands find new and inventive ways to improve their short and long-term objectives.