Steve Fredette, President & Co-Founder of Toast — Helping Restaurants Delight Their Guests
Today as consumers, we expect SMBs to take credit cards, optimize for the best merchandise and menu options, and provide gift card options. Gabriela Ariana Campoverde sits with Steve Fredette, President, Co-Founder and a Director of Toast to learn to how Toast began a new wave of innovation to change how customers experience restaurants and retailers and how SMBs access the latest fintech can offer. Toast is an all-in-one point-of-sale and restaurant management platform for businesses in the food service and hospitality space. Since its inception in 2011 it has helped clients delight their guests, do what they love and thrive.
In this episode you will hear about:
- What new features better served Toast clients during the COVID-19 pandemic
“It’s following our customers and following technology trends. . . . They were important in the beginning and they’re still important now. And so if you look at what we did through the pandemic, we looked at what’s changed in the restaurant industry — what does the restaurant industry need right now? And the answer was quite clear. We needed touchless payments. We needed online ordering technology to be significantly better than it had been in the past. We needed delivery service. We launched Toast Delivery Services last year. Toast Order and Pay — it’s Toast’s scan to pay, those were two QR code based touchless payment options and ordering options. We launched Toast Now, which allowed non-Toast POS customers to leverage our online ordering platform.”
- What Toast Capital means for the restaurant industry
“We saw other players that were having success with a capital model. We felt like we had the opportunity to do the same and have the same success and bring greater access to capital and better access and better rates to the restaurant industry because we had so much data on our customers and how successful they were. And even though a lot of our customers may not have the best credit scores, we know they’re still good. They’re still good businesses because we see their payments coming in and operationally, we have a much simpler process to offer loans because we already have done the AML and KYC checks that a financial institution would need to do because we do their payments.
We already have their bank account information on file. We can very easily deposit the money into their account the next day. We can underwrite them automatically, and then we can start processing loan repayments from a percentage of the payments — of what’s going into their account. Otherwise, a typical traditional bank just can’t do any of those things, and so it becomes a much more complicated process to get a loan. [For them] the default rates are higher, and the repayment rates are higher, and the administrative cost is higher, and therefore the rates are higher.”
- All about Toast’s culture:
“We definitely feel like we are in the same industry as our customers, and we’re part of that environment. Hospitality is something we really talk a lot about and care about. We want our culture to be a hospitable culture. One of our core values is to embrace the hospitality mindset when it comes to hospitality. We’re big believers in the concept of hospitality as the way you make other people feel — sort of a Danny Meyer definition. . . . Starting with the other people on your team and then your customers, and then your vendors and everybody else around you.
- Steve’s favorite food tradition
“My wife’s family would do this every year, and it was always going to be themed. It started off being called seafood night because it was always themed around seafood, but over the years, the theme has changed. This year it was Vietnamese food and we made some really good food this year. . . . Then my other side of my family would often do things in the summer. Like on the 4th of July, we’d do a burger competition and I made this delicious pineapple burger once. I think I won that competition. I made this frozen mango margarita that was really good, too!”
- And much more!
About Steve Fredette
Steve Fredette is President, co-founder and a Director of Toast, where he leads product and innovation initiatives. Prior to Toast, he worked on mobile app development before the iPhone came out, creating the first Flickr and Shoebuy.com apps. At Endeca, now Oracle, he co-founded their mobile commerce business, building the product team and driving sales, marketing, and services to over $10 million in revenue in two years. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied Chemistry. His favorite toast is Marble Rye.
About Toast
Toast is an all-in-one point-of-sale and restaurant management platform for businesses in the food service and hospitality space. For additional information on Toast, please visit pos.toasttab.com.
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