Toast wants to open a restaurant

It was only a matter of time until a point of sale company built a business around its products.

🏝 I’m headed out on vacation for the next two weeks but have some good content lined up while I’m gone, including a new episode of my podcast, The Simmer, coming next week.

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Toast is looking for a new kind of restaurant partner. The point of sale and payments company is actively recruiting an operator to build a new restaurant concept in Boston alongside the tech company’s product teams.

Toast will fund the opening — or at least “help” to fund the opening — per a release. The selected operator will enjoy a direct line to Toast’s executive team and early access to all the company’s tech. Toast calls the initiative Toast Lab, a fitting title for an experimental proving ground of sorts. Interested (and aspiring!) restaurants can apply through July 14, but the contest is limited to existing Toast operators who have used the platform for more than six months. Specifics of the deal, including the amount of funding and any potential ownership stake or controlling interest, will be decided after the operator is selected before the end of the year.

We’ve seen this kind of collaboration before.

DoorDash has dabbled in restaurant operations; Square has helped to document openings and once opened its own proof-of-concept brick-and-mortar around the corner from my house. Tech companies get a real-life proving ground for their products and, in the case of a successful restaurant, years or even decades of promotion. I can already imagine the press release headlines: Toast made this restaurant an overnight success!

I’m happy to see restaurant technology companies supporting restaurants (or, in this case, restaurant) in this way. But interested parties should definitely read the fine print:

“Applicant grants Toast a non-exclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully sublicensable, worldwide license to use, reproduce, modify, and create derivative works from materials submitted as part of the Application (”Submission Materials”) for any business purpose. Toast may independently develop concepts similar to those in Applicant’s Submission Materials, and nothing herein restricts Toast’s right to do so. Applicant represents that it has the right to submit all materials included in the Application. Applicant should not include any information it considers trade secret or proprietary unless willing to do so subject to these Terms.”