Last weekend, I took my daughter to a playdate in San Francisco. We were late and running for the underground train at the Castro Street Muni station, which we then saw was absolutely covered in bold ads for Toast, the restaurant point of sale and payments company.
Less than a week earlier, Toast released a three-minute short. The video features industry inside jokes delivered, in part, by chef-turned-actor Matty Matheson who appeared in The Bear, the wildly popular TV show scripted around work in restaurant kitchens. It was filmed at Marea, a fine-dining restaurant in Manhattan.
Both the ads and the short, according to Toast chief marketing officer Kelly Esten, are part of a new marketing campaign. It targets “restaurant people,” she says, conceding that Toast wants to increase brand awareness among the restaurant-going set, too.
Toast has always had a strange type of consumer presence for a company that makes its money from payment processing. Years ago, diners clocked its bubbly logo as a recognizable symbol of tech-savvy restaurants. (A win!) Conversely, when the company tried to add a consumer-facing 99-cent per-order charge in 2023, it backfired. Toast’s shareholders loved the idea of charging customers a dollar to use its technology, but its restaurant customers did not appreciate the intrusion. Toast walked it back a few weeks later.
Toast’s new we-know-restaurants campaign lands as the company publicly announces its move beyond restaurants into grocery and convenience stores. Toast’s CEO, Aman Narang, told investors and analysts last summer to expect the change, which broaden’s the company’s customer base.
“Within retail, there are some very specific needs, and there isn’t a great cloud provider that has taken over the space,” Narang said in August.
Esten addressed all of this in our recent conversation, sharing more about that three-minute ad and what comes next. Tl;dr: the diners are actors, but the waitstaff is real. Marea executive chef, PJ Calapa, is in on the gag, but its waitstaff is not.
There’s more below for paid Expedite subscribers. Thanks, as always, for supporting this independent newsletter. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
