When Eric Padilla worked inside a restaurant group’s marketing department in Orange County, he noticed something about the agencies pitching for the business. They rarely showed up with cameras. The content calendar ran on stock images, or on whatever a phone could produce in a hurry, and the result rarely looked like the actual food on the plate.
That observation became the working premise behind Palatable Promotions, the agency he launched in May 2015. Rather than sourcing images from libraries or billing photography out separately, the company sends someone to each client’s location every month to shoot original content, then builds the social media campaigns, email programs, and paid advertising around those images. The practical argument, as Palatable Promotions frames it, is that people encounter food visually before they encounter it in person, and the photograph has to hold up.
The Restaurant Foundation
Padilla’s path to agency ownership did not follow a conventional marketing route. His first serious encounter with social media was in 2002, at a platform called Melodramatic.com, a community that functioned years before Facebook made the concept familiar. Users posted on each other’s walls, messaged across the country, and built connections without meeting in person. He watched closely how content drew people in and what made communities form around it.
A decade later, he was working in sales at a well-known Orange County steak, seafood, and brewery concept when his responsibilities expanded to include the group’s digital presence. Over three years with the TAPS Fish House & Brewery group, which included The Catch in Anaheim and Lillie’s Q in Brea, he managed social media for five restaurants across three concepts, coordinated community events, oversaw the email database, and eventually led the marketing function for the multi-location operation. The work was operational in a way that agency work rarely is: he was managing printing and copywriting, building relationships with the surrounding business community, and running group events on-site.
By May 2015, he had a clear picture of where restaurant marketing tended to fall short, and he left to build something around fixing it.
Building the Agency
Palatable Promotions launched with a focus on food and beverage, and those roots remain visible in how the company presents itself. The Foodventures section of the website is a running log of restaurant visits across Orange County, part personal recommendation column and part portfolio of Padilla’s food photography.
The services have since expanded beyond restaurants. The agency now offers social media management, professional photography, website design, search engine optimization, email marketing, and geo-targeted paid advertising. Monthly Google Analytics reports come included, giving clients a documented view of what the digital activity is producing. According to a 2021 profile published by VoyageLA, the client base spans restaurants, e-commerce brands, service businesses, nonprofits, breweries, and car dealerships.
Pricing is not fixed. According to the company, packages are built around each client’s concept, goals, and budget, with social media services carrying a minimum three-month contract and a discount for annual commitments.
Community Work in Brea and Fullerton
The years at the TAPS group also introduced Padilla to the business networks around Brea and Fullerton, and those ties have remained active. He serves on the board of directors of the Brea Chamber of Commerce. According to the 2021 VoyageLA profile, he also served as Chairman of the Chamber, led the Brea Young Professionals organization, and chaired the Taste of Brea event in 2014 and 2015. The profile additionally noted his involvement on the board of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Fullerton and as a founding partner of VELEOS, a local business network.
For Padilla, the community involvement and the client work share a common logic. Sustained presence, whether on-site with a camera or at a chamber meeting, tends to produce results that remote and transactional relationships do not.
Palatable Promotions is based in Orange County and works with clients across Southern California.
