Toast (NYSE: TOST), a digital platform for the hospitality sector, has announced new platform updates for retailers, including enhanced retail-specific features for its Toast IQ AI assistant and core platform improvements. These updates are designed to improve operational efficiency and accelerate business growth for retailers.
Omri Traub, COO, Retail at Toast, stated, “Retailers need new ways to unlock greater efficiency and growth—without adding time spent or operational complexity. With Toast IQ, operators have an AI-powered ‘right hand’ partner that understands the flow of inventory and pricing as naturally as a store manager does, surfacing helpful, actionable insights at the right time. And features like Advertising make it easy to reach new customers. These updates are designed to help our retail customers gain a critical edge. We will continue to innovate in collaboration with customers as we grow our retail community on Toast.” The company plans to present these new functionalities at the 2026 National Retail Federation Show in New York City.
Recent Toast research indicates that over 83% of food and beverage retail operators anticipate increasing their use of AI tools in 2026. The Toast IQ AI assistant empowers retailers to respond to natural language prompts, providing instant insights into sales performance, low stock levels, and potential margin improvements. Its latest updates integrate restocking, pricing, seasonal, and SKU management insights directly into the Toast platform. This allows retail operators to streamline daily tasks and make data-driven decisions more rapidly. Toast IQ facilitates the transition from insight to action within the platform, enabling users to ask complex questions and implement changes, such as identifying items nearing depletion, out of stock, or inactive for over 30 days, or suggesting margin and pricing adjustments to meet sales goals. It also supports real-time actions like marking items out of stock directly from the chat interface and optimizing product catalogs by highlighting missing barcodes or out-of-date shelf labels.
Beyond the AI assistant, Toast is rolling out several other platform enhancements for retail operations. These include AI invoice scanning, which automates the entry of invoice details into Toast’s receiving workflows to reduce manual labor and improve inventory accuracy. New integrations with DIGI America and Upshop 360 will introduce cloud-enabled scales and labeling solutions, allowing for immediate price adjustments on weighted items and providing a unified system for pricing, labeling, and inventory management. Toast Advertising aims to help retailers acquire new customers through digital ads on Google and Meta, offering AI-powered suggestions and pre-filled recommendations for quick campaign launches and transparent ROI insights linked directly to online and in-store sales. Beta users running Google Ads campaigns with Toast Advertising have observed an average return on ad spend exceeding 8X. Additionally, the Toast Go® 3 handheld device will feature upcoming barcode scanning capabilities, enabling staff to process sales, check inventory, and conduct stock-takes from anywhere in the store without the need for separate scanning equipment.
Kirsten Maitland, Co-Owner at Rebel Cheese in New York City, shared her experience with Toast, highlighting its role in inventory management and real-time visibility. “Even with all the complexities of selling cheese by the quarter-pound and accounting for samples, Toast makes the whole system run smoothly. The team can update inventory in seconds, and Toast keeps everything accurate across in-store and delivery channels. It takes what could be a really complicated process and makes it simple and reliable—and because of that, we haven’t had an out-of-stock issue in a long time,” Maitland stated. She added, “Margins and cash flow are things I’m constantly watching, and Toast makes that so much easier. Prices are always fluctuating, so I rely on Toast to monitor my margins and alert me when something drops below my threshold. If an item falls under 40%, I know right away and can either raise the price or stop carrying it. With hundreds of products, you can’t track every single item manually—Toast gives me the visibility to protect my margins and take action fast.”
Toast describes itself as a cloud-based, all-in-one digital technology platform designed for the entire restaurant community, providing SaaS products and financial technology solutions for point of sale, payments, operations, digital ordering and delivery, marketing and loyalty, and team management. It serves as a restaurant operating system, connecting front-of-house and back-of-house operations across various service models including dine-in, takeout, delivery, catering, and retail, to streamline operations, increase revenue, and enhance guest experiences.
