Toast Brings Mobile Payments-Style Value to Restaurants

It’s one thing to say that mobile payments and mobile systems in general mean value for their users. They speed up flow through a restaurant, save customers time, and keep waitstaff from having to do a lot of extra running around. In general, that sounds great, but no one sells on features; they sell on benefits. To that end, Toast dropped word our way about some recent experiments it ran that demonstrate the effectiveness of mobile technology in restaurant settings.

The first experiment was run at Odd Duck, a restaurant that specializes in locally-sourced ingredients in what’s considered a “quirky” menu. Odd Duck typically sees weekend wait times of two hours or more on weekends and is routinely booked solid. The addition of Toast handheld systems allowed each server to turn one more table than normal that night, which over the course of a year, represents about half a million dollars in extra revenue. Better yet, the improved speed coupled with their standard excellent service meant, on average, an extra $7,000 a year in tips for the waitstaff.

A subsequent experiment featured O’Maddy’s Bar and Grille, a business which believed it was at max capacity, until Toast stepped in. Toast’s systems allowed O’Maddy’s to bring in—get this—an extra $1 million in annual revenue. And this from a property that had been running for 27 years as it stood! Given that O’ Maddy’s was already bringing in about $5 million a year in revenue, bumping that up 20 percent is no mean feat.

Basically, Toast is bringing in extra revenue for its customers, and it’s got at least two restaurants’ worth of evidence to make that abundantly clear. From there, a choice to buy must be almost terrifyingly simple; it’s hard to turn down a system that has historically made its users extra revenue, as long as the system doesn’t actually cost more than the revenue generated. Restaurants are notoriously low-margin businesses. With tools like this, it could prove a competitive edge as long as every restaurant in town doesn’t bring them in, so that could be a point in its favor too.

At any rate, Toast’s experiments prove, and pretty clearly, that having Toast on hand makes for a lot of improvement in a restaurant’s bottom line.