Toast Deepens Commitment to Food and Beverage Retailers

Company showcases complete retail offerings for convenience stores, bottle shops, and grocers

Toast (NYSE: TOST), the digital technology platform purpose-built for hospitality, is deepening its commitment to convenience stores, bottle shops, and grocers in 2025, kicking off the year by showcasing its comprehensive food and beverage retail solution at the National Retail Federation Show in New York City. Toast Retail is designed to enable convenience stores, bottle shops, and grocery stores to operate faster and more efficiently, modernize inventory management, and create delightful guest experiences.

“Toast has more than a decade of experience helping restaurants of all sizes and types adopt new technology so they can run more efficiently and deliver memorable guest experiences. Now we’re doing the same for the food and beverage retail community,” said Steve Fredette, President and Co-Founder at Toast. “As the lines between retailers and restaurants continue to blur and more retailers transition to the cloud, we see a clear opportunity for Toast to be the technology platform of choice for convenience stores, bottle shops, and grocers — providing a modern inventory management experience in an easy to use platform, and helping to serve consumers in new ways. We look forward to continuing to build our offerings for the retail community.”

Toast helps retailers evolve to meet food and beverage expectations

In recent years, more retailers have started to offer made-to-order and prepared foods while more restaurants are offering merchandise and other retail items (stock-keeping units or SKUs) for sale. In fact, 56% of consumers now consider convenience stores as viable options for made-to-order food over fast food restaurants, according to Intouch Insight’s 2024 Third-Party Delivery Report. According to a recent Toast study, more than half of food and beverage retailers offer some form of foodservice_1_. Toast is designed to support retailers’ increasingly complex operations, enabling retailers to seamlessly use multiple service models and checkout experiences in-store and online — all on the same platform that more than one hundred thousand restaurants use. 

Ashlea Hogancamp and her husband, Matt, had difficulty finding high-quality, organic food items for their growing family – so they decided to open a neighborhood store, Herban Market. They quickly saw rising demand from customers who wanted prepared food items alongside their retail shopping experience. Looking for a POS provider to handle their retail and dine-in needs, she turned to Toast. 

“At Herban Market, we care deeply about providing convenient, high-quality experiences for our customers,” said Ashlea Hogancamp, co-founder of Herban Market. “When we decided to offer food alongside our grocery items, our original POS created major issues for us as volume increased. We lost hundreds of dollars a day from ticketing and checkout issues. We switched to Toast because they were one of the only partners we could find that could help us manage our high-volume retail and food service business on one platform. Since we switched to Toast, not only have prepared food orders been seamless, the inventory management insights have helped us better curate our SKUs so we always have our customers’ favorites in stock – helping us be competitive with the big-box grocers & restaurants.”

Toast Retail provides retailers the tools to delight their customers, seamlessly manage inventory, and streamline operations

With the combination of our retail-focused products and the existing functionalities from our robust all-in-one platform, Toast's offering helps convenience stores, bottle shops, and grocery stores of all shapes, sizes, and concepts save time, streamline inventory management, and enhance the customer experience. Toast Retail offers retailers:

• Smart inventory planning with historical sales data. For example, Toast Retail predicts the number of days before an item runs out on the shelf. The Purchasing & Receiving features streamline the process of ordering from suppliers so retailers will never run out of their customers’ favorite items. This tool takes the guesswork out for retailers so they can get their inventory just right – no more “too much” or “too little”. 

• Mobile-first technology with SmartScan, which takes a new SKU from scan to shelf in seconds. Retailers can use their mobile device and point it at an item's barcode. SmartScan pulls in essential information for a new product including a name, brand, a high-quality image, and an AI-generated recommended description, which retailers can use for an online listing of that item.

• SKUs at-scale. Repricing items, printing barcodes, changing stock status, and many other common operations can be performed on thousands of SKUs at once with Bulk Actions.

• Toast’s Multi-Location-Management and Cross-Location Inventory Transfer features help retailers expand to multiple locations without losing an accurate view of their inventory. If retailers want to offer their customers a craft beer in six packs or a single can or even as part of a gift basket, these tools give them the flexibility to sell and bundle their SKUs. 

• Thorough retail hardware support via Toast’s integration with barcode scanners, grocery scanners, scales, and deli scales to ensure their grocery operations can continue to run smoothly. 

• Tools for a faster checkout experience. Staff can use Toast’s point-of-sale (POS) Terminals and give guests full visibility into their purchases with a Guest-Facing Display. Retailers can upgrade the self-checkout experience for their customers with Toast’s Kiosk to help speed up lines on busy days or do some ‘line busting’ with Toast Go® 2, Toast’s handheld terminal.

• Enhanced foodservice in all forms. Toast spent years working with thousands of restaurants of different sizes and concepts to hone and develop a leading restaurant POS that can handle anything from grab-n-go to made-to-order dishes. Toast’s Online Ordering allows customers to order their groceries and a lunchtime sandwich for curbside pickup, and Toast’s Kitchen Display System helps staff fulfill those deli orders. 

• SNAP EBT Payment Processing. In partnership with Forage, Toast retailers can now accept SNAP EBT benefits. Through this integration, retailers and restaurants can use Toast’s existing technology to seamlessly onboard, navigate the USDA certification process, and enable SNAP EBT at the POS – growing their revenue while supporting American families in need. 

• Integrations with Vroom, an online ordering system that allows consumers to place orders from their local convenience store; and CityHive, an e-commerce online ordering solution for the wine and spirits industry.

Kris Larson is the owner of the Oshkosh, WI restaurant Becket’s and of Wagner Market  —  an independent grocery store that offers meat (including handmade brats and sausages), craft beers, local produce and cheeses, and more. He uses Toast for both his restaurant and grocery store. He chose Toast for his grocery store because he wanted a POS that was faster and more efficient. 

“SmartScan has been a paradigm shift for us — training employees to add new inventory used to take hours, and now it takes minutes,” said Larson. “What transferred from restaurant POS to grocery POS better than any of us expected was the speed of the operation – checking people out rapidly. Other retail POSs are designed only to handle simple items. You can control Toast’s POS like a restaurant menu where you've got infinite control of categories and it gives you a better view of reporting. The fact that what works for a restaurant works for the retail side is still unbelievable to me.”

Visit our retail page and National Retail Federation Booth #203 in the food innovation zone to learn more.