Can Toast charge your restaurant guests a service fee?

1. Can?Toast?charge your restaurant guests a service fee?

Toast is a special software that helps restaurants manage their operations better.

It allows them to process payments and provides other useful features.

Restaurants join Toast by paying a fee.

However, the customers who eat at the restaurant or order food online are not directly involved with Toast.

The main customer of Toast is the restaurant itself, as they are the ones who take orders, prepare food, and provide the service.

The customers pay the restaurant for the service they receive, and they might not even be aware of Toast's existence.

What makes Toast different is that, even though it serves restaurants, it charges the customers of those restaurants—the people who eat there—a fee.

Toast can do this because it controls the point-of-sale system (the software that handles payments) for these restaurants.

Toast decided to get involved in the relationship between the restaurant and its customers without asking for permission.

To make things worse, Toast also decided to add an extra charge to the restaurant's customers without their permission. This action shifts any potential complaints or dissatisfaction about the fee to the restaurant itself.

So, you the restaurant is left with the responsibility to explain the situation to your customers.

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2. What Restaurants Need to Know About Sourcing Locally

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The 2008 Farm Bill said that locally or regionally produced food is from places less than 400 miles away.

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But now, people think it means food from less than 150 miles away.

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If you're good at gardening, you can get very local food for your restaurant.

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You can grow your own fruits and vegetables nearby. This is called hyperlocal sourcing.

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It's good if you want special or hard-to-find ingredients. When you grow your own food, you have more control over what goes on your menu.

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People usually think of fruits and vegetables when they think of local food.

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3. What's New in Full Dining, after the Pandemic??Survey says ...

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Outback Steakhouse?moved into the top spot after rising 8 percent, to an?American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI)?Satisfaction Index score of 83.

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The survey’s authors suggested the brand’s rollout of handheld ordering tablets, and new ovens and grills, helped the brand improve its order accuracy, food quality and food menu variety scores.

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Two additional steakhouses–LongHorn Steakhouse?and?Texas Roadhouse–each climbed 3 percent to meet?Cracker Barrel?(up 5 percent) in second place at 82 apiece.

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ACSI said that three of the top four scores belonging to steakhouses could soon be negatively impacted if record cattle prices continue.

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“With beef prices on the rise, these brands may face challenges in managing price increases and supply chain pressures,” added?Forrest Morgeson.

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“On the other hand, the current inflationary environment is benefiting some of these brands as higher-income consumers opt for more affordable chain restaurants over pricier alternatives. This is definitely worth monitoring.”

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4. Can AI Answer Your Call?

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“Everyone is frustrated with the experience of calling a business,” explained?Alex Sambvani, Slang.ai CEO and cofounder.

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“No one likes waiting on hold with a retailer to check on an order status or calling their local restaurant to make a last-minute reservation and having their call go straight to voicemail.

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It doesn’t have to be this way. AI has the potential to fix this broken experience, and?Slang.ai?AI is bringing AI to the phone.”

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Samvani and his fellow cofounder and Slang.ai CTO?gabriel duncan?both formerly worked at?Spotify?as data scientists, which is where they “discovered how powerful and beneficial an AI-powered phone concierge could be for the restaurant/hospitality industry,” according to a Slang.ai spokesperson.

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