Toast is an all-in-one restaurant management platform that combines point-of-sale hardware, online ordering, payment processing, payroll, marketing, and kitchen operations into a single system. For custom web application development, Toast's API platform enables developers to build integrations that connect with restaurant data including orders, menus, employees, labor costs, and sales analytics. This is critical when building custom restaurant management dashboards, multi-location reporting tools, third-party delivery integrations, or operational systems that need real-time access to what is happening across a restaurant's front-of-house and back-of-house operations.
Toast was founded in 2012 in Boston by Steve Fredette, Aman Narang, and Jonathan Grimm. The three founders had previously worked together at Endeca, an enterprise software company that was acquired by Oracle. They chose to focus on the restaurant industry after observing that most restaurants were still running on legacy POS systems from the 1990s that were slow, expensive, and not connected to the internet. The founders spent their early days going restaurant to restaurant in Boston, talking to owners and managers about their pain points. Toast went public in September 2021, and the IPO valued the company at roughly $20 billion, making it one of the largest restaurant technology companies in the world.
The pandemic dramatically accelerated restaurant technology adoption. Restaurants that had resisted online ordering and contactless payments for years suddenly needed all of those features immediately.
Toast nearly went under during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. As restaurants across the country shut down, Toast's transaction-based revenue dropped by more than 50 percent almost overnight. The company was forced to lay off roughly half of its 4,500 employees. But then something unexpected happened: the pandemic dramatically accelerated restaurant technology adoption. Restaurants that had resisted online ordering, contactless payments, and QR code menus for years suddenly needed all of those features immediately. Toast's platform was perfectly positioned to deliver them, and the company rebounded so strongly that it went public just 18 months after nearly running out of cash.
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