Company rolls out highly anticipated app and makes major updates to new POS experience, all designed to boost restaurant efficiency and enhance control

Toast (NYSE: TOST), the all-in-one technology platform built for restaurants, today announced significant updates to the Toast platform, including the launch of a new mobile app and an enhanced point-of-sale (POS) experience. The new Toast Now mobile app is designed to meet the dynamic nature of how owners and operators manage restaurants and help them remain in the know, on the go, and in control with real-time reporting and key controls. Additionally, Toast’s new POS experience has been reimagined from the ground up to provide users with more helpful features, workflows designed to help speed up service, and a comprehensive design update that introduces an attractive and streamlined new look—resulting in a system that is easier to set up, learn, and use. Both Toast Now and the new POS experience are available to all Toast customers.

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(Photo: Toast)

“From high inflation to hectic lives, restaurant owners and operators are often managing changing restaurant dynamics on the go—and we believe that the right technology partner is critical to helping keep restaurants at the top of their game,” said Steve Fredette, President and Co-Founder of Toast. “The new Toast Now mobile app and POS experience are purpose-built for all restaurants, built in close collaboration with our customers, and reaffirm that when a restaurant partners with Toast, they benefit from ongoing innovation designed to make running a restaurant easier, faster, and more intuitive. As we seek to serve the entire restaurant community, Toast will continue to innovate in ways that both meet the unique needs of different restaurant types—and also offer universal benefits.”

Toast Now app enables Toast access from anywhere

Toast Now is designed to meet the ever-changing nature of running a restaurant—giving owners and operators the flexibility and control to run their restaurants from anywhere, at any time, ensuring they are constantly connected to what’s going on, whether on-site or a thousand miles away. In beta testing, users of Toast Now are logging into the app approximately three times more frequently than the average customer logged into Toast’s web portal, as the app enables the flexibility to check in throughout the day.¹

Toast Now is designed to build an experience that is simple to use and enables restaurants to:

• Increase access to information with real-time reporting: Easy and instant access to performance data is critical for owners and operators to effectively manage operations. In the Toast Now app, managers can get real-time updates with live sales and labor reporting—so they can easily monitor and compare top-performing items, profitability trends, and more across different time periods and multiple locations. Any owner and operator can leverage these insights to make key business decisions in the moment.
• Stay in touch while on the go with Manager Log: It can be challenging to keep tabs on operations, especially when the owner or operator travels between multiple locations, is out sourcing ingredients for new menu items, or is searching for new locations for their next concept. Toast Now’s Manager Log allows restaurant owners, operators, and managers to communicate and coordinate with staff and stay on top of things without physically being in the restaurant.
• Optimize kitchen flow with delivery channel control: Staff can help ensure a seamless guest experience both on and off-premise by managing kitchen volume. Toast Now makes it easy to manage delivery channels with quick toggles for turning first and third-party ordering channels on and off to ensure a manageable flow of orders to the kitchen. With the app, owners, operators, and managers can also remove a menu item on the fly to manage guests’ expectations and help employees solve stock shortages in real time.

Toast Now has become a key tool to Bodega Taqueria y Tequila, a fast-casual, Mexican-inspired restaurant with a speakeasy lounge with seven locations in cities including Miami, Chicago, Washington, DC, and Nashville. “We’ve given Toast Now to our whole company, not just operations,” said Jared Galbut, CEO at Bodega. “Teams, including Human Resources and Marketing, have found it helpful to analyze sales and labor trends in order to better manage our business, and we all love being able to see real-time sales data and know how the business is performing as much as we do.”

New POS experience designed to help speed up service and drive ease of use

According to Toast’s latest Voice of the Restaurant Industry survey², two of the most important purchasing considerations for small and medium-sized restaurants in 2024 will be the depth of features in core POS and the ability to increase guest throughput and turn-time efficiency. Toast’s new POS experience is built to help enable restaurants to operate seamlessly with access to more features and controls than ever before, accompanied by intuitive screens designed to improve speed and accuracy.

In an industry where muscle memory is everything, the guiding principles for the new and improved design are intentionally centered around helping users maximize every moment—from serving busy morning commuters to getting new staff trained quickly. The enhanced POS experience is designed to allow Toast customers of all types to enter orders and close checks faster, easily access information for better table service at their fingertips, and improve the staff shift close-out process.

Examples of additional enhancements include Advanced Table Management, designed to give servers more control and insights that enhance the guest experience through features such as table timers to help optimize pacing and table turnover and also indicate which tables need attention. Servers can also be in greater control with Server Item Fire—built to help support the right dish coming out at just the right time. Table Screen Enhancements on the new POS help staff eliminate errors with updates to layout, font sizes, colors, and more. When it is time for evening service with lower lighting, for example, the table screens now include a Dark Mode, allowing the POS to better blend in with the ambiance. And Open View is designed to speed up and improve order-taking accuracy by displaying items and modifiers all at once to help establishments with high traffic volume and highly configurable menu items keep the line moving, even with lots of complicated orders.

Toast customer BBQ Holdings is a growing multi-brand restaurant company that owns and operates several restaurant brands, including Famous Dave’s, Granite City Food and Brewery, Urban BBQ, and many more across the United States. The new POS experience has been a feature that restaurants across their portfolio have added to their daily operations.

“We have seen great adoption of the new POS experience within our brands and are excited to have a point-of-sale partnership that provides us with new and exciting features,” said Michael Plate, POS Manager at BBQ Holdings.

Toast Now is available on iOS and coming soon to Android, and the new POS experience is available to all customers now. Learn more about Toast Now and New POS Experience.

FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This press release contains “forward-looking statements,” within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements may be identified by the context of the statement and generally arise when Toast or its management is discussing its beliefs, estimates or expectations. Such statements generally include the words “believes,” “plans,” “intends,” “targets,” “may,” “could,” “should,” “will,” “expects,” “estimates,” “suggests,” “anticipates,” “outlook,” “continues,” or similar expressions. These statements are not historical facts or guarantees of future performance, but represent the beliefs of Toast and its management at the time the statements were made regarding future events which are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and other factors, many of which are outside Toast’s control. Actual results and outcomes may differ materially from what is expressed or forecast in such forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding the launch of ToastNow and the enhanced POS experience.

The forward-looking statements contained in this release are also subject to other risks and uncertainties, including those more fully described in Toast’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), including in the sections entitled “Risk Factors” and “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations'' in Toast’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2022, Toast’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2023, and Toast’s subsequent SEC filings. Toast can give no assurance that the plans, intentions, expectations or strategies as reflected in or suggested by those forward-looking statements will be attained or achieved. The forward-looking statements in this release are based on information available to Toast as of the date hereof, and Toast disclaims any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. These forward-looking statements should not be relied upon as representing Toast’s views as of any date subsequent to the date of this press release.

TOST-CORP

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¹ Based on Toast internal data from September 1 to September 30, 2023.

² To help better understand the restaurant industry, Toast conducted a blind survey of 847 vSMB/SMB restaurant decision-makers from May 26, 2023 to June 20, 2023. Respondents were not made aware that Toast was fielding the study. Panel providers granted incentives to restaurant respondents for participation. Using a standard margin of error calculation, at a confidence interval of 95%, the margin of error on average is +/- 3%.

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