How Toast And Fiserv Are Widening Their Reach in Restaurants

Competition for payments processing in the $1 trillion plus U.S. restaurant industry, already hot, reached a higher temperature Tuesday with announcements from Toast Inc. and processing giant Fiserv Inc.

Toast, a 15-year-old specialist in restaurant point of sale, said it is expanding its reach in the complex pizza business with its signing of Hungry Howie’s, a Madison Heights, Mich.-based chain of some 500 locations in 18 states. Toast’s technology will be implemented chainwide, the companies said.

The agreement calls for Hungry Howie’s to adopt Toast’s point-of-sale devices, kitchen-display system, and payment-processing platform. Toast says it will also offer “AI-powered insights” to the chain through Toast IQ, a conversational assistant built into the company’s POS platform.

The Toast implementation at the chain could prove uniquely challenging. In part because of the wide variety and combinations of toppings and sizes, pizza is a complicated business, observers say, which can act as a bar to some payments processors. Ultimately, “you need to be able to coordinate information from all locations,” says Cliff Gray, proprietor at Gray Consulting, a payments advisory. “As long as the POS software supports that, that’s appealing to the merchant.”

That challenge should be manageable, Gray adds. “Howie’s can import its specific rules and ingredients, and can configure the Toast software to manage all that,” he notes.

At the same time, Fiserv is targeting fine-dining establishments with a partnership involving its Clover POS technology and Tabit, a developer of mobile POS capability based on AI. The resulting technology, called Clover Reserve, is expected to handle such functions as multi-course pacing and floor management, in addition to payments.

The two companies have ambitious plans for the new service, “By combining Fiserv’s powerful ecosystem with Tabit’s AI-first hospitality orchestration platform, we’re bringing the industry a new generation of restaurant technology, one that goes far beyond traditional POS,” says Nadav Solomon, president and co-founder of Tabit, in a statement.

Fiserv announced in July that it had reached 4 million Clover devices sold since the processor First Data acquired the technology in 2012. Fiserv acquired First Data in 2019 for $22 billion in an all-stock transaction.