In-person events build connections with brands that extend beyond geography. That’s the vision fast-casual chain Cava pursued with its three-part Mediterranean Summer Supper Series over the last three months. Although the gatherings brought a few hundred guests together offline, they garnered hundreds of millions of impressions online and generated buzz across social media platforms.
Nitya Madhavan, Cava’s senior vice president of brand strategy and marketing, said the series of events continued a broader trend across the restaurant industry: brands making a splash online by bringing people together for events.
Nitya Madhavan is Cava’s senior vice president of brand strategy and marketing.
“You want to make sure that you’re reaching people where they are, and digital and social channels are still where people are engaging with brands—feeling the connection and finding their communities,” Madhavan said. “But we’re also seeing this pendulum shift back to in-person experiences and these analog experiences.”
The three events started in June with Cava’s “longest table ever” bringing together several dozen guests at a community farm in the heart of Hollywood on the summer solstice, followed by an immersive dinner experience during the FIFA World Cup with celebrity chefs and Premier League athletes at the Rockefeller Center in New York City, and concluded with a dinner along the coast with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco in early August.
“We wanted to make sure that we had a very curated, select set of events that were spread across the country, so it gave people an opportunity to join us in different locations,” Madhavan said of the strategy behind the campaign. “But we also purposefully kept it very intimate and special because we wanted people to feel that sense of connection with us and with each other and not feel like it was a mass approach. So it was a very curated, by-design experience that we crafted these three specific events.”
For the final event, Cava put the destination in the hands of its online following, and voters narrowly selected San Francisco over Seattle by less than 1 percentage point. During that sold-out dinner, brand leaders shared that a restaurant was coming to the Bay Area in 2027—an announcement that Madhavan said generated 450 million online impressions alone.
The brand has 476 locations, about 40 of them in California. The brand opened 17 restaurants in Q2 2026, representing a 19.6 percent increase in total units year-over-year, according to an August 11 earnings report.
Cava announced plan to open a location in the San Francisco Bay Area by 2027 during an August 6 in-person event in San Francisco.
“As people travel around and experience Cava, they really become huge fans, so we’re constantly being asked to come to new cities,” Madhavan said. “So, we thought it was a really great opportunity to bring Cava to a city that we don’t yet exist in, so that people could experience our hospitality firsthand and not have to travel to do that.”
In addition to building connections among attendees, which Madhavan said proved successful with guests forming group chats at the events, and garnering significant online attention, the series also aimed to highlight seasonal menu items.
The strategy of leveraging in-person events to build brand awareness follows previous efforts by the brand with similar strategies, including a marketing campaign in April that sent people in bear costumes around New York City, with Cava bags, accompanying the introduction of salmon as the first-ever seafood protein to join the brand’s menu.
“At the end of the day, we’re not going to do something if we don’t feel like it’s a really core part of who we are,” Madhavan said of the thought process behind the Mediterranean Summer Supper Series. “From a business perspective, we had a brand-new menu coming out this summer, and so we wanted to make sure that people really were aware of what was new on the menu.”
Madhavan anticipated that Cava would continue to use the in-person event strategy to bring attention to announcements and product launches going forward. Additionally, she said that approach is increasingly utilized across the restaurant industry and beyond.
“There’s a real opportunity for all of us, whether you’re in the restaurant industry or across any category, to recognize that human connection is a really profound way to build brand loyalty, to build brand understanding,” Madhavan said. “We’re in a moment in time right now where anything that we can do as a brand, or just as humans, to give people a chance to connect and bridge relationships with each other is a really positive thing.”
Cava hosted an emmersive dinner experience July 9 at the Rockefeller Center in New York City.
