Toast

Restaurant owners manage operations, not technology. They need point-of-sale systems, ordering, inventory, staffing. Toast realized traditional processors like Square were built for retail. Restaurants needed something different. Toast built payment processing for restaurants exclusively, or software understood food service operations. The insight was vertical. Instead of a horizontal payments company serving everyone, toast would own restaurants completely. The software integrated ordering, kitchen display, inventory, and payments. A manager could see everything from one dashboard. That integration made toast more valuable than generic processors because it solved restaurant problems specifically.