Café Bon Appétit (BAMCO)

Four years as account lead on a WordPress Multisite: 450+ café sites powering the web, Menu Mail, and digital signage

Tech: WordPress Multisite, Laravel, API, AWS, Cloudflare

The challenge

Bon Appétit serves thousands of cafés nationwide on a platform that was already live when I joined. Guests expect accurate menus, nutrition, allergy, and sustainability information wherever they are: on the web, in their inbox, or on screens in the café. That content has to reflect their specific campus, café, and time of day. The work is less about a one-time launch and more about sustaining and evolving a high-traffic multisite without disrupting day-to-day operations.

The solution

As account lead, I partner with Bon Appétit’s product owner and our agency bench on strategy, roadmapping, and delivery, extending a WordPress Multisite that powers location-specific websites, Menu Mail newsletters, and on-campus digital signage, with custom post types and templates built for each product surface.

Outcome

One multisite network: web, email, and signage in sync.

4

Years as strategist

450+

Active sites

250k+

Daily visits

Project team

My role

Agency account lead and strategy

Agency team

Design, front-end development, back-end development, project management, two DevOps engineers, and team lead

Client team

Product owner, project management

Built before I arrived, still evolving today

Café Bon Appétit’s WordPress Multisite was already in production when I came on. For the past four years, I’ve served as account lead and strategist, helping Bon Appétit sustain, extend, and plan ahead on a platform that cannot afford downtime or regressions at this scale.

One platform, many touchpoints

Café Bon Appétit’s ecosystem spans more than a marketing website. Guests interact with the brand through cafébonappetit.com, scheduled email updates via Menu Mail, and digital displays on campuses and in corporate environments. WordPress Multisite ties it together, so menu boards, newsletters, and web pages share a common content strategy instead of living in separate silos.

Infrastructure at scale

The platform runs on AWS with Cloudflare in front, supporting 450+ active sites and 250,000+ daily visits across multiple products. Our DevOps engineers keep environments stable while the development team ships features for web, Menu Mail, and digital signage without compromising performance.

Digital Signage

On cafebonappetit.com, digital signage is implemented as a custom post type. Signage items (menu boards, promotional slides, and campus displays) are created and managed inside WordPress like posts or pages, with fields and templates tailored for on-screen content. That structure enables scheduling (when a slide appears or expires), consistent branding with the web experience, and dynamic display across cafés and corporate environments, all without a separate signage CMS.

Menu Mail

Menu Mail is Bon Appétit’s email newsletter system for sharing café menus directly with guests. Instead of relying only on the website or on-site screens, subscribers receive scheduled menu updates in their inbox, formatted from branded templates and scoped to their café or location. It keeps guests informed about daily and weekly offerings, encourages repeat visits, and works alongside the main web experience and digital signage as the email layer of the same content ecosystem.

Information guests can trust

Whether someone checks a site, opens an email, or glances at a screen in the café, the goal is the same: clear access to nutritional, allergy, and sustainability information when they need it. Centralizing that in WordPress Multisite means Bon Appétit’s teams can publish once and reach guests across every channel, at national scale, with local precision.