Can TOST's Tech-Driven Recipes Spice Up its Profitability & Revenue?

Toast Inc. TOST is on a mission to expand its footprint across geographies, verticals and segments, empowering restaurants of all sizes with digital tools that streamline operations. While Toast started with small and medium-sized (SMB) restaurants, it is now targeting food & beverage retail, international and enterprise chains as well. The platform supports multi-location management, enabling consistency across menus, promotions and performance tracking. It currently supports around 140,000 locations worldwide.

TOST’s strategy not only helps restaurateurs thrive in an increasingly digital, data-driven economy but also drives long-term average revenue per user (ARPU) growth and higher win rates for the company. These four key pillars are: scaling locations and market share in its core U.S. restaurant business, demonstrating that new markets can drive meaningful growth, increasing adoption of its broad platform with a focus on data and AI differentiation, and maintaining high standards while investing in key priorities and gradually expanding margins.

Toast’s dedicated focus on the restaurant industry has allowed it to develop a differentiated, all-in-one platform that serves a wide range of businesses, from small coffee shops to Michelin-rated restaurants. AI represents a major opportunity to further accelerate the uptake momentum. Restaurant operators have limited time, and AI offers a unique way to make its platform easier to use and more powerful across many tasks.

At the Investor Day 2024 event, Toast introduced Sous Chef, an AI assistant designed to support restaurant operators. Currently, in pilot testing, it’s showing promising early results and continues to improve with customer feedback. Sous Chef aims to be a daily companion for operators, offering business insights, resolving issues and handling tasks like menu management, ordering, staff scheduling and marketing.

Toast, Inc. Price and Consensus

Toast, Inc. price-consensus-chart | Toast, Inc. Quote

Building on this, it has developed ToastIQ—an AI-powered intelligence engine that combines restaurant expertise, data and AI to enhance its platform. Early adopters, such as Mission Boathouse in Massachusetts and Felipe’s Taqueria, have experienced a positive impact. The company’s digital chit tool, which brings key guest data directly into POS systems, is also helping create more personalized guest experiences.

In addition, it has rolled out key updates for front-of-house staff, including improvements to POS, kiosks and kitchen displays. To boost guest engagement, it launched Websites, Branded Apps and AI-powered SMS Marketing. TOST also enhanced reporting, payroll and accounting tools and introduced a Benchmarking tool to help restaurants manage costs and gain insights.

Toast had a strong start to the year and raised its full-year outlook. It now expects 26% growth in fintech and subscription gross profit, up from the prior 23-25% range. Adjusted EBITDA is now estimated at $550 million, with a 31% margin, an increase of five points from 2024 (the prior view was $510-$530 million at a 30% margin). It remains on track for strong growth and rising profitability while continuing to invest in key long-term priorities.

Who’s Challenging Toast in the Software Industry

Tech giant Oracle ORCL offers a wide range of products, including POS systems like Oracle Retail Xstore and Oracle MICROS Simphony POS. MICROS Simphony targets large restaurant chains, hotels, casinos and resorts. As a unified cloud-based POS platform, it enables restaurant owners to efficiently manage both online and on-premise operations in real-time from any device. It provides exceptional hospitality from arrival to departure and beyond, using advanced POS and property management solutions.

Block XYZ, formerly known as Square, offers financial and marketing services through its comprehensive commerce ecosystem that helps sellers start, run and grow their businesses. Block’s Square for Restaurants POS platform competes directly with TOST’s offerings. Strong Square ecosystem accounted for $1.48 billion in transaction revenues in the last reported quarter, up 5.9% year over year. The latest Square Point of Sale app offers seven modes that are purpose-built for different industries.

TOST’s Price Performance, Valuation and Estimates

Shares of TOST have gained 76.7% in the past year compared with the Zacks Internet-Software industry's growth of 37.2%.

From a valuation standpoint, TOST trades at a forward price-to-sales of 3.2X, lower than the industry’s average of 5.68X.

The Zacks Consensus Estimate for TOST’s earnings for 2025 has been on the rise over the past 60 days.

TOST currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank stocks here.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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