You are not out of ideas. You are out of a system. Most owners treat every post as a fresh invention, which is why the well runs dry by the third week and the grid goes quiet during service. Fix the structure and you never stare at an empty caption box again.
3-5 per week: Hootsuite recommends three to five Instagram feed posts per week as a strong baseline
2 per day: Instagram's Adam Mosseri recommends around two Stories per day
Why you keep running out of things to post
Running out of content feels like a creativity problem. It is a structure problem. When you decide what to post on the morning you post it, you are inventing from zero every single day, and nobody can invent 20 fresh things a month while running a kitchen.
The operators who post consistently are not more creative than you. They stopped thinking in one-off ideas and started thinking in content types. A content type is a lens, not a topic. "The dish" is a lens you can point at a new plate forever. "A regular" is a lens that refills every week a familiar face walks in. Ideas run out. Lenses do not.
The five buckets that always refill
Sort everything you could ever post into five buckets. Each one is a lens you can reuse for years.
- The dish. The hero plate, the pour, the prep, a new item, the thing people already order. Your most reliable bucket and the one you underuse.
- The people. The 6am bake, the barista dialling in a shot, the kitchen at full tilt. Behind the counter is content nobody else can copy.
- The community. The table that comes every Friday, the neighbourhood, a regular you name and thank. This is what makes a small room feel like somewhere.
- Offers and occasions. An iftar set during Ramadan, an Eid family platter, a National Day special, a quiet-Tuesday deal.
- The story. Why you opened, where the beans come from, the dish your grandmother made. Origin is a bucket most kitchens forget they own.
Five lenses. Point any of them at this week and you have something true to say.
A month mapped to the buckets: a Dubai worked example
Buckets are only useful once they sit on a calendar. Here is a month for a Karama or Oud Metha kitchen, three feed posts a week, rotating the lenses so nothing repeats too soon.
- Week 1 dish (the signature plate), people (the morning prep), community (a Port Saeed regular by name).
- Week 2 offers/occasion (your iftar set if it is Ramadan, otherwise a weekday deal via Talabat), dish (a new item), story (why you opened here).
- Week 3 people (the kitchen mid-service), community (a neighbourhood shout), dish (the pour or the plate that photographs best).
- Week 4 occasion (National Day or Eid family platter), dish (a customer favourite), story (where an ingredient comes from).
Tie every occasion to a real plate you actually serve. An Eid post with no Eid dish behind it reads as noise, and your regulars can tell.
