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.
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