It’s rare you get to see two companies of such different stock lifting their skirts at the same time, but Toast and Olo offer us the perfect opportunity to examine what’s happening in the restaurant industry and, we’d argue, in brick and mortar generally.
For simplicity’s sake, Olo is a SaaS online ordering tool that larger restaurants use to fulfill online ordering, clearly a growing part of customer needs in a COVID era. Toast is a financially engineered payments vehicle masquerading as a SaaS POS company with greater success in SMB, where its customers can’t read a contract and are vastly more prone to paying through the nose on payments fees.
Likely the best analysis Reforming Retail has ever done, and that’s saying alot.
thanks Chuck. Just saying what you and I have known to be true for years
Few questions, if I could:
1/ what do you mean by this? ‘data cleansing required to make SMB online ordering work is a real headache’
2a/ Looks like Olo can integrate with all delivery marketplaces while Toast works exclusively to integrate with Doordash. yes?
2b / Also looks like Toast does not have a white label app product like Olo?
3/ Where did yo get Toast monthly data?
Great post JT. As a PAR shareholder I hope Toast doesn’t force a deal. I like the team/corporate culture Savneet is building and think its actually customer focused which makes it quite unique in the industry.
Agree that Savneet knows what he’s doing. But at the end of the day, you shareholders will vote what makes the most amount of money, and that might be an exit to Toast
Over the short term it might make the most money, but over the long term I am not so sure. Will be interesting to see how it all plays out. Thanks for all your great work on the blog. It’s a fantastic resource.
100%. But companies manage to the quarter.