Toast, the POS supplier that dominates the market for small- and medium-sized restaurants, is now setting its sights on big fast-food chains.
The company plans to launch its first drive-thru product this year, executives said Thursday, marking an aggressive move into the quick-service market.
Boston-based Toast already works with one out of five independent restaurants and small chains in the U.S., a number that has nearly doubled over the past three years, it said. It added a net 30,000 locations in 2025 for a total of about 164,000.
Over the past couple of years, Toast has also begun to pursue bigger brands. In 2025, it landed deals with Applebee’s, Firehouse Subs and Papa Murphy’s, launching into the enterprise market with a bang.
But it has not yet broken into the drive-thru, the largest sales channel in fast food.
“All of our wins so far and the progress we've made, it's been in casual dining, it's been in sit-down,” Toast CEO Aman Narang said during an earnings call with analysts. Launching a drive-thru product “is going to open up that market in a much bigger way than has been available historically.”
The system will be designed to handle some of the complexities of drive-thru operations, including multi-lane drive-thrus, he said.
Narang also suggested that the product could have an AI voice component at some point.
“Voice is another opportunity,” he said. “You think about walking up to a kiosk, going through a drive-thru, or walking up to a terminal, leveraging voice to automate some of the work of placing an order.”
Toast signaled its drive-thru ambitions in February 2023 when it acquired Delphi Display Systems, a maker of digital drive-thru signage and software.
Overall, 2025 was another year of strong growth for Toast, which offers a wide range of tech products and generates most of its revenue from payment processing.
Total revenue rose 24%, to more than $6 billion. Operating income was $292 million, a more than 1,700% increase from the prior year.
Toast stock was up more than 5% Friday morning.
Members help make our journalism possible. Become a Restaurant Business member today and unlock exclusive benefits, including unlimited access to all of our content. Sign up here.