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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Toast

Consolidation Comes for the Restaurant Back Office

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Consolidation of restaurant tech companies has been a topic for years. And in the last few months, deals like PAR’s acquisition of guest loyalty platform Punchh and Squarespace nabbing hospitality company Tock suggest M&A is alive and well in restaurant tech. 

News from the last week suggests that the next big area of restaurant tech up for consolidation is the restaurant back office. 

Toast, which wants to be the Swiss Army Knife of restaurant tech, recently said it is acquiring xtraCHEF, whose software digitizes and organizes back-of-house and back-office tasks. Think accounting, scheduling management, inventory management, and budgeting. While Toast’s partner network features a number of different back-office software platforms, restaurants can integrate into their systems, the full acquisition of xtraCHEF means Toast can add to its own ever-growing list of software products for restaurants. 

Shortly after the Toast news, Restaurant365 said it was acquiring Compeat, which digitizes labor, accounting, vendor relationships and other tasks for restaurants. In this case, Restaurant365 is itself a back-office company, with software that does much the same thing as Compeat. The acquisition suggest Restaurant365 wants to increase and improve its capabilities in this area. 

Both deals are notable because, until now, the back office has been less of a priority for restaurants and has received way less investment money over the years than front-of-house tech and customer-facing tech. Amid a broader industry consolidation (see above), this past week’s deals suggest a greater need, or at least desire, from restaurants for more precise management over their bookkeeping, inventory taking, and other behind-the-scenes tasks.

That isn’t too surprising. The last year or so devastated the restaurant industry. Excepting chains with deep pockets a la Chipotle, those that have managed to hang on are operating off margins even more razor-thin than they were before the pandemic. Better management of inventory, invoices, vendor relationships, and so forth means a better overall view of where costs in a restaurant are going, which could ultimately save businesses money at a time when there isn’t much of it to be had. Those restaurant tech companies that can are swooping in to add more tools for the back office in the hopes of staying at the top of a restaurant tech space that’s currently more bloated than Taco Bell’s pre-COVID drive-thru menu.

Whether digitizing the entire back of house will make enough of a noticeable difference in restaurants’ margins will be determined only at some point down the road, when more restaurants have swapped pen and paper for mobile apps and other software. If they do. After all, these systems aren’t free to implement, so it remains to be seen how many restaurants, particularly small and/or independent ones, do so in the near future.

In the meanwhile, restaurant tech consolidation will continue. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if a company like Restaurant365, which though large still only focuses on one area of the restaurant, were picked up by an even larger all-in-one platform like Toast. 

Stay tuned . . .

More Restaurant Tech Headlines

Starbucks Reinstates Its Reusable Cup Program With a Low-Tech Twist – Starbucks will reinstate its reusable cup program in the U.S. on June 22, more than a year after suspending the program because of COVID-19-related safety concerns. 

JustKitchen Raising $20M, Expanding into the U.S., Asia – Vancouver, Canada-headquartered JustKitchen announced this week it is in the process of raising $20 million to expand its network of ghost kitchens and virtual restaurant brands.

Virtual Restaurant Company Curb Raises €20M – Stockholm, Sweden-based ghost kitchen startup Curb has raised funding to expand its ghost kitchen network and virtual restaurant portfolio.

Toast Acquires Back-Office Software Platform xtraCHEF

Restaurant tech company Toast has acquired back-of-house management platform xtraCHEF, according to a Toast statement released today. The deal follows a partnership the two companies launched in 2020. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Acquiring xtraCHEF will give Toast access to back office tools that automate tasks like invoicing, budgets, and recipe and inventory management, among other things. The pitch xtraCHEF has long given restaurants is that its software platform can help manage food costs and achieve better margins. Andy Schwartz, CEO of xtraCHEF, said the deal will combine Toast’s point-of-sale data with his company’s line-item spending details, giving restaurants “a true end-to-end view of their financial health.” 

The xtraCHEF/Toast integration already boasts a long list of capabilities, including digitizing invoices and receipts, synching daily sales data from Toast with budget targets, setting price alerts, and managing all documents in one central cloud-based location.

Up to now, xtraCHEF has been listed alongside several other integrations on the Toast site, including beverage-specific inventory platforms like Bevspot and PourMyBeer, as well as general back-office platforms like PeachWorks and Synergysuite. With the announcement of the acquisition, xtraCHEF will become xtraCHEF by Toast.

Both Schwartz and xtraCHEF CTO and cofounder Bhavik Patel will remain in their current roles for now.  

Losing margins to wasted and/or mismanaged inventory has been an issue for years, as has general organization of the restaurant back office. The pandemic-related losses restaurants have suffered over the last year and a half have made the need for more precise BOH management more urgent for many.

Many back-of-house-focused platforms exist nowadays and promise to digitize more of what goes on behind the scenes at restaurants. Galley, Statis.ai, and SousZen are other companies bringing more technology to this space. But as Toast’s Partner Network can attest, the restaurant tech space is rather bloated at the moment, which makes further consolidation a foregone conclusion. End-to-end platforms like Toast and Square will likely be snapping up other restaurant tech players in the near future as digitization becomes more mandatory for doing business.

Raydiant Teams Up With Toast to Make Menu Management Easier for Restaurants

Digital signage platform Raydiant announced today it has joined Toast’s Partner network and will now integrate with the latter’s digital menu app. The main goal of the partnership is to provide restaurants with an easier, faster way to keep menus updated across every single channel through which orders arrive.

Nowadays, restaurants juggle an increasing number of order channels compared to even one year ago — delivery (third-party and in-house), curbside, pickup, and drive-thru, to name a few. The task of updating the menu across all these different digital properties is an obvious candidate for automation, considering the time it would take to manually change each individual menu (not to mention, the risk of human error).

Raydiant’s SaaS tool syncs a restaurant’s menu with Toast’s POS system so that any changes — pricing, promos, 86’d items — will automatically change across all a restaurant’s different digital channels. For restaurants with multiple units, the changes apply across all locations.

Via the same interface, restaurants can also create QR codes for ordering and payments in the restaurant or at the drive-thru.

This automated, all-in-one approach to menu management became something of a “must-have” last year thanks to the ever-changing dining room restrictions related to the pandemic and the addition of new sales channels. When front-of-house-focused restaurant tech companies started releasing their so-called “contactless” tech bundles for the dining room, automated menu management started to become more commonplace. Sevenrooms, Paytronix, and several other companies in Toast’s partner network also offer similar functionality. In other words, there is a lot of competition in this particular area right now.   

Raydiant raised a $13 million Series A round in January of this year. The company said it more than tripled its revenue in 2020, and increased its customer base by 60 percent.

WSJ: Restaurant Tech Company Toast Planning an IPO

Restaurant tech company Toast is planning an initial public offering, sources familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal over the weekend. These people suggested an IPO could value the company at around $20 billion, and that Toast approached Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. to underwrite a possible listing later in 2021.

Toast may also consider other options, such as a sale or a combination with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), WSJ sources said.

The speculation comes almost exactly one year after the COVID-19 pandemic forced the restaurant industry to close down dining rooms and significantly alter its focus towards meal formats like delivery, takeout, and curbside pickup. 

Toast initially took a major hit from the effects of the pandemic. In April 2020, the company cut 50 percent of its staff through layoffs and furloughs. It cited the “massive disruption” otherwise known as COVID-19 that “hit the industry overnight” as the driver behind these cuts.

Over the rest of 2020, however, Toast’s situation improved dramatically, thanks to its ability to quickly shift direction. Unable to serve the dining room, the company started adding more off-premises-focused features to its restaurant tech stack, including software to facilitate delivery orders and a set of so-called “contactless” tools that enable digital ordering, payments, and menu browsing. 

As of November 2020, Toast was valued at $8 billion, up $4.9 billion from February of 2020. An IPO would be one of the largest thus far for a restaurant tech company, following DoorDash’s December 2020 IPO, which valued the third-party delivery service at almost $40 billion.

Toast Launches a Winter Recovery Fund for Restaurants

Restaurant tech company Toast today announced a $35 million relief plan for restaurants as winter begins and the pandemic continues to disrupt normal operations. 

The Boston, Massachusetts-based company said today this “relief package” is in response to the status of the RESTAURANTS act, which is part of a larger stimulus plan and therefore currently stalled in Congress. Were it to pass, a $120 billion grant program would be available for those in the restaurant industry impacted by the pandemic. The point, however, is that it hasn’t passed yet, winter is here, and many restaurants are on the brink of permanent closure if they don’t receive assistance.

Toast’s Winter Restaurant Recovery Fund is not near the size of the $120 billion figure of the aforementioned legislation, but it could provide a temporary boost to restaurants in some areas. 

The fund is available to Toast’s current customers. Through it, restaurants can access funding they can put towards winterization (aka, making outdoor dining feasible in cold weather) and working capital needs. They will also receive a one-month software credit for their current Toast tech stack and complementary access to the company’s online ordering, payroll, and marketing products. Finally, restaurant customers will also be allowed to pass their one-month software credit on to another restaurant (that doesn’t have to be a Toast customer) facing greater hardships. 

According to the Toast website, restaurants do not have to take any extra steps in order to activate their one-month credit. For the funding portion of this relief package, restaurants will need to apply.

Toast has been quick to respond to restaurant industry needs brought on by the pandemic. In March, just as COVID numbers were rising and businesses closing, the company launched an initial relief plan and, like others, eliminated software fees for restaurant customers. Over the last several months, it has also released a slew of new products and features geared towards native delivery and contactless order/payments. 

The restaurant industry in all likelihood stills need major assistance from Congress. (Honestly, it probably just needs a bailout.) In the meantime, assistance packages like those from Toast and other restaurant tech companies are able to provide some breathing room and help businesses keep the lights on one more week.

Report: Restaurant Tech Company Toast Is Now Valued at $8B, Could IPO in 2021

Months after laying off half its staff, Toast has reached an $8 billion valuation, according to a new report from CNBC.

That new valuation, up from $4.9 billion in February of this year, is the result of a secondary sale Toast closed out last week. Through that deal, both current and former employees could sell up to 25 percent of their vested shares for $75 each. Toast said the deal was for up to 800,000 shares, totaling $60 million. 

It’s a big change from April, when the company cut 50 percent of its staff. In a letter to employees, CEO Chris Comparato said the layoffs were in response to “massive disruption” caused by COVID-19 that “hit the industry virtually overnight.” The move also called into question the value of restaurant tech in general, which runs the gamut in terms of providing businesses with products that deliver on ROI and those that are, as a friend of mine likes to say, solutions in search of problems. 

Toast has sat squarely in the middle of those two extremes for a long time. Once offering just a humble POS system, the company has over the years  added payroll and team management, email marketing capabilities, and a massive list of third-party integrations. There were plenty of valuable uses for the Toast ecosystem, but that seemed to be part of the problem, too. One glance at the company’s sight shows how easily overwhelmed a restaurant owner or manager could get by the number of available options. 

Toast, however, seemed to grasp the idea that too many bells and whistles can be no good thing, and more recently (since the pandemic hit), the company’s new features have been focused on the most important area of the restaurant biz right now: making off-premises orders more efficient, faster, and of better quality. The company released a platform to process delivery orders in April. It has since also launched a “contactless” suite of products for ordering and payments. Nowadays, a restaurant could easily run an entire off-premises business using Toast’s platform. With more restaurants than ever adopting digital ordering and off-premises channels like drive-thru, curbside, and ghost kitchens, Toast’s recent focus on the to-go world could wind up being very fruitful for the company. Hence the $8 billion valuation.

CNBC noted that Toast’s rebound “has been so rapid” that investors on the secondary market have recently put in bids above the $8 billion valuation. People familiar with the matter who spoke to CNBC also said the company “is viewed as a potential 2021 IPO candidate.”  

Toast Launches a Tech Suite for Contactless Restaurant Payments

Restaurant management platform Toast today launched what the company is calling its “contactless payments suite” that includes two new social distancing-friendly ways for customers to pay for their meals: Toast Go 2 and Toast Order & Pay. The products aim to minimize staff-to-customer interactions for both off-premises orders and those that take place in the dining room, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.

Toast Go 2 is the latest iteration of the company’s existing handheld POS device. This time around it includes the option for contactless payment forms from Apple, Google, and Samsung. Because its handheld, it can be used in more locations than the dining room, curbside pickup and drive-thrus being two obvious places. Toast said in today’s release that this latest version of Toast Go has processing speeds that are “three times faster” than previous generations.

Meanwhile, Toast Order & Pay is the company’s take on the contactless payments technology most restaurant tech companies now offer. With it, customers can browse menus, select food, and pay for it from their own mobile device. Toast’s version follows similar offerings from Presto, Paytronix, Zuppler, and many others.

However, all of these companies are trying to push contactless tech for the dining room when there aren’t many restaurant dining rooms to speak of at the moment. New pandemic-related restrictions are sweeping across the U.S. and either limiting or shutting down indoor dining once more. While demand for more contactless tech indoors will likely exist over the long term, there may be less use for it over the next several months.

Toast, then, is wise to diversify its contactless platform with the addition of Toast Go 2. Making off-premises orders more efficient (i.e., faster) is a huge priority for restaurants large and small nowadays — as lengthening drive-thru wait times and a surge in to go orders can attest. That factor will stick around long after the pandemic leaves us, making handheld POS tech a valuable play for the longer term. 

Ordrslip Adds Postmates Integration to Its Mobile App Software for Restaurants

Restaurant tech company Ordrslip announced today it has partnered with Postmates to add delivery integration into its mobile app software, according to a company press release sent to The Spoon. Per today’s announcement, Ordrslip’s software lets restaurant customers “create custom-looking whitelabel mobile ordering applications via Ordrslip.”

It’s no secret that, since the pandemic pushed the restaurant industry to off-premises formats, usage of mobile apps for ordering and payments is on the rise. It’s also pretty commonly known at this point that sophisticated apps a la Starbucks are far too expensive and resource-consuming for most independent restaurants and chains to create themselves. Hence the growing selection of tools (see below) various third parties offer to get restaurants the digital properties they need without decimating their already decimated margins.

The Ordrslip approach is this: Ordrslip creates a branded mobile app for the restaurant with all the features needed to fulfill pickup and delivery items, including order-ahead capabilities, payments, iOS and Android compatibility, POS integration (only with Square and Clover for now), and order tracking. You can read the full list of features here. The app looks and functions as if it belongs to the restaurant but is powered by Ordrslip’s softare in the background. As of today, there is the option to add Postmates integration in order to fulfill the last-mile delivery end of the operation.

The promise is that by using Ordrslip with the new Postmates integration, restaurant customers can bypass the controversial per-transaction commission fees they normally get charged by third-party delivery services. Ordrslip pricing is $100/month per location or $1100/year per location, with one-time setup fees of $1,000 and $750, respectively. (The setup fee applies to all locations a restaurant might operate.)  

On the one hand, those are high numbers for already struggling restaurants, which would have to be doing enough delivery to surpass $100/month in commission fees per transaction. On the other, there’s a pandemic happening and folks are staying at home and ordering more delivery. In other words, $100 in commission fees to Grubhub Et al is probably on the low end these days, though restaurants still have to pay some commission to Postmates for delivering the order.

Ordrslip is one of a growing number of companies offering restaurants workarounds to 30 percent commission fees on delivery orders. POS platform Toast, ChowNow, and many others have various tools in the market that let restaurants process orders and payments through a separate platform so they only need to use the delivery service for actual deliveries. Another company, ShiftPixy, bypasses delivery services altogether and provides the drivers itself. And even the delivery services themselves are participating in this trend. Uber Eats is piloting a tool that lets restaurants process orders through their own platforms, though Uber Eats retains the customer data.

Uber Eats also just announced its plans to buy Postmates for $2.65 billion, a deal that is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021. That deal is unlikely at this point to affect a partnership like the one Ordrslip announced today.

Survey: Safety Is Now a Top Concern for Restaurant Customers Ordering Off-Premises

A quality off-premises restaurant experience is no longer just about food arriving on time and fries not being soggy. According to restaurant tech company Toast’s latest report, attention to cleanliness and safety is one of the top three concerns for restaurant guests for both delivery and takeout orders.

The Toast report, which The Spoon received a copy of, surveyed over 700 restaurant guests around how their expectations have changed as a result of the pandemic and what they consider to be an ideal restaurant experience today.

Almost half, or 48 percent, of guests surveyed placed cleanliness/safety as the top third concern for delivery orders, behind quality of food and ease of ordering. Another 40 percent placed it as the second main concern for takeout orders.

Seeing as we’re in the middle of a global pandemic, it makes sense that safety has wound its way to the top of the list for restaurant consumers. (As a category, cleanliness and safety were much lower on the list of concerns when Toast published a similar guest survey in January.) But Toast’s report also found that guests are ordering takeout more frequently than delivery.

From the report:

“7% of guests reported ordering takeout through a third- party app multiple times a day. 9% of guests reported ordering takeout through a restaurant’s app or website once a day. 16% of guests reported ordering takeout through a restaurant’s app or website multiple times a week. And 20% of guests reported ordering takeout through a restaurant’s app or website once a week.”

Cost, of course, remains a big issue with third-party delivery apps. That’s especially true now, with many restaurants trying to offset the high commission fees these services charge by raising delivery prices. But given the pandemic we are in, safety is obviously a growing concern.

One reason takeout might be more popular right now than delivery is that food goes through more touchpoints when someone drops it at your house, since the meal has to be collected by a driver. Issues around delivery drivers tampering with food abounded even before the pandemic. In response, some chains now offer tamper-free packaging. But even setting that aside for a minute, customers still have to worry about the cleanliness of the driver’s vehicle, whether or not that person is sick, and if they are wearing protective gear. Toast noted in its report that, at least for now, customers “might prefer the level of control over cleanliness and safety they get when picking food orders up themselves.”

Toast recommends that restaurants communicate frequently and clearly with customers about steps they are taking to keep their businesses safe. However, it can be tough to guarantee safety if the food is leaving their hands and going to the customer via a third-party delivery service. There’s no quick fix for that, unfortunately, since most restaurants can’t afford to keep their own delivery fleet. For now, restaurants should continue prioritizing cleanliness on takeout orders and hope their third-party delivery counterparts are doing the same.

Sevenrooms Raises $50M Series B Funding for Its Data-Driven Restaurant Tech Platform

Restaurant tech company Sevenrooms has raised $50 million in Series B funding. The round was led by Providence Strategic Growth and brings Sevenrooms’ total funding to $71.5 million. According to a press release sent to The Spoon, Sevenrooms will use the new funds to “further enhance” its restaurant guest-management platform as well as continue expanding globally. 

Sevenrooms, which was founded in 2011, has over time evolved from a reservations platform to a full suite of front-of-house tools that nowadays includes some pandemic-friendly features like contactless ordering and payments. The company continues to offer its reservations system, as well as waitlist and table management tools, marketing automation, and online ordering. Pre-pandemic, Sevenrooms was exploring voice-enabled restaurant tech as well as data-driven personalization.  

Like other front-of-house-focused restaurant tech companies, Sevenrooms quickly reacted to the COVID-19 crisis and the dining room shutdowns that followed. At no extra cost, it launched its DirectDelivery feature, which gives restaurants more ownership over their customers data on delivery order. The company also recently released its version of the contactless dining kit, meant to equip freshly reopened restaurant dining rooms with more contactless solutions, from order and pay technologies to digital menus. 

Others have made similar moves recently. In fact most restaurant tech companies — Presto, Zuppler, Paytronix, etc. — are offering enhancements to their platforms that emphasize contactless tools for the restaurant dining room.

Standing out from the masses will be the biggest challenge for all of these companies. Sevenrooms’ previous work around voice tech and personalization would give it a push in a somewhat unique direction. Its continued focus on giving restaurants more control over customer data will also be an important asset for the company going forward as digital properties become the restaurant experience, rather than an add-on sales channel.

Revention Rebrands as HungerRush, Launches Off-Premises Enhancements

Restaurant tech company Revention has rebranded as HungerRush and announced a new set of features aimed at helping restaurants fulfill off-premises orders. According to a tip sent to The Spoon, new products include contactless delivery capabilities, driver tracking, and integration with third-party delivery services.

HungerRush’s focus on digital ordering and off-premises orders isn’t completely new. As Revention, the restaurant management platform already included integration with some delivery companies, mobile and online ordering, and the ability to manage customer loyalty programs. 

The new features are mostly enhancements to existing products. HungerRush Drive lets restaurant operators track drivers as they deliver orders, which is becoming a more common practice nowadays. There is also messaging system for curbside pickup orders, where customers can notify the restaurant when they arrive, as well as the addition of more integrations with third-party delivery services, including Postmates, Grubhub, and “hundreds more,” according to today’s press release.

HungerRush is rebranding and releasing these features at at time when most restaurants continue to focus on improving their digital ordering as well as the process for takeout and delivery. The pandemic forced many restaurants into the off-premises world, and though dining rooms have reopened in a lot of states, they’ve done so with reduced capacity, not to mention customer base rather wary of going out to eat. It’s pretty much assumed at this point that restaurants must continue building to-go strategies to make up for lost revenue and keep the lights on.

Many a tech company promises to help in that area. Toast, Presto, CardFree, Sevenrooms, and a boatload of others have all announced new features or product enhancements that emphasize digital ordering and contactless delivery/pickup.

How well they deliver on these promises is what will determine who has value and who’s expendable when it comes to choosing a restaurant tech platform. For example, having a system for customers to message the restaurant when they arrive for their curbside order is smart. But geofencing tech, which automatically alerts the restaurant when a customer arrives, is even more efficient. 

HungerRush is old guard when it comes to restaurant tech companies, having been founded in 2003. (It’s also very popular with pizza chains, for some reason.) Time will tell if these new enhancements to its platform will be enough to compete with the dozens of other offerings vying for dominance as the restaurant industry reinvents itself. 

Toast’s New Delivery System Is (Potentially) Cheaper for Restaurants Than Third-Party Services

Once a simple POS system for restaurants, Toast has over the years morphed into the Swiss Army Knife of restaurant tech platforms, offering everything from payment processing hardware to back-of-house payroll software. Add delivery to that list. Today, the company announced the launch of Toast Delivery Services, which will, according to a company press release “eliminate high commission fees” from third-party services like DoorDash or Grubhub.

To do that, Toast will “enable restaurants of all sizes with an on-demand network of local drivers”. That’s a big point, since an expensive aspect of any partnership with a third-party delivery service is the cost of paying drivers.

Typically, restaurants pay higher commission fees to third-party delivery services when they need access to the entire delivery stack: the marketing, the technical ability to process orders, and the drivers themselves. While subtracting any one of those can lessen a commission fee, most restaurants need the whole stack. And, as we discuss frequently, the commission fees for those things can be 30 percent per each individual transaction — a point that’s rightly causing a lot of uproar right now as restaurant struggle to stay alive in the face of dining room shutdowns.

To be clear, though, Toast is not supplying those drivers itself. A Toast spokesperson told me over email that, “Drivers do not work directly for Toast. Toast Delivery Services powers technology to dispatch local drivers from 3rd party network partners to fulfill all orders.” Who those third-party networks are was left unsaid.  

It seems, then, that Toast is acting as more of a middleman between the restaurant and the driver fleet. Restaurants can still access third-party drivers, only through a partnership with Toast, which would process the orders, not Grubhub or DoorDash or Uber.

Restaurants will also still pay fees per transaction on orders, but via Toast, those are based on a flat rate rather than a percentage of each order. According to the company release, “the cost to deliver within a five-mile radius is under $8, versus a percent of sales.” More specific numbers weren’t given, and that’s where the benefits get a little cloudy. Depending on the size of the order, that under $8 figure may or may not be higher than what Grubhub et al. would charge.

For the sake of argument, let’s say I order a $15 burrito from a restaurant three miles away. Grubhub would charge a roughly $4.50 commission fee to the restaurant. Toast hasn’t said how it exactly calculates the distance-based fee, which means the commission on my burrito could be lower, about the same, or even higher, if the flat fee winds up being $8. 

That said, with shelter-in-place orders still active and many families hunkering down at home, larger orders and family-style meals are all the rage on restaurant menus right now. A 30 percent commission fee of a $40 family order would cost the restaurant $12 if they were working with DoorDash or Grubhub. In that case, Toast’s flat fee would be considerably cheaper, if the restaurant was within five miles of the delivery destination. Toast’s spokesperson said that “Typically the delivery fulfillment radius serviced by [Toast] is 3-5 miles.”

There are a couple clearer spots in this news. Restaurants wanting to set up Toast for Delivery do not need existing Toast POS hardware. Customers will also keep control of their customer data, which is another sticking point with third-party delivery services. 

Earlier this month, Toast cut 50 percent of its staff, prompting the question of how much restaurant tech a restaurant actually needs. Toasts new delivery system will have to prove itself a significant money saver for restaurants in order to stand up against the major third-party services.

Much of that would depend on the size of the orders a restaurant typically processes. I suspect those will continue to be larger for some time to come. Even when more states ease shelter-in-place restrictions, restaurant dining rooms will operate with far fewer tables and a lot more rules. Diners — many of which will be wary about going out to eat at all — may prefer to order in for the whole family instead. If that winds up being the case for the foreseeable future, Toast’s new system may prove an attractive bet for restaurants looking to improve their delivery logistics.