POS · Restaurants and food service
SpotOn pitches softer contracts. Square wins the counter. Toast still owns the full-service dining room.
Toast is the restaurant-native POS and payments platform built on its own Android hardware. The install base is the largest single account list in US restaurant tech, still adding locations every quarter while SpotOn, Square, and Clover fight over renewal windows. If you sell anything that touches a restaurant operator, this is the customer file your AE team has been asking for.
net new locations per quarter
Toast added roughly 7,000 net new restaurant locations in the most recent quarter, the steady pace of its land-and-expand motion against Clover, Lightspeed, SpotOn, and Square.
annual recurring revenue
Toast crossed roughly $2.2B ARR in Q1 2026, public on NYSE under TOST since September 2021. That is the revenue lens. The storefront lens is the one your AE team will work.
standard operator contract
Toast typically locks independents and multi-unit groups into 2 to 3 year terms with bundled hardware. SpotOn and Square displacement reps pitch shorter commitments at every renewal window.
Source: Orbital data team, June 2026 snapshot.
POS alternatives in every deal cycle
itypical contract before renewal
iverified records in the free sample
iDisplacement overlap
Where Toast operators shop when the contract comes up.
Five platforms cover almost every restaurant POS deal cycle against Toast in 2026. The bars below reflect how often each name shows up in head-to-head displacement conversations for independent and multi-unit operators, not total install base.
Alternatives
Top Toast alternatives, ranked by where they actually compete.
If a restaurant operator is shopping POS in 2026, these are the five platforms they will look at against Toast. The rank below reflects how often we see each name in the deal cycle for independent and multi-unit restaurant operators, not market cap. Each name links to the same vendor-side view: who runs it, and how to reach them.
| # | Alternative | How it positions against Toast |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SpotOn | The closest head-to-head competitor for independent and multi-location restaurant operators. Restaurant-native POS plus marketing and online ordering, often pitched on softer contract terms than Toast's 2 to 3 year standard. |
| 2 | Square | The default for smaller cafes, food trucks, and single-location independents that want a generalist POS with flat-rate processing and no multi-year contract. Wins on switching cost, loses on restaurant-specific depth. |
| 3 | Clover | Bank and processor-distributed POS hardware with a restaurant mode. Operators end up on Clover because their merchant services rep sold it, not because they shopped restaurant POS. Strong displacement target for Toast. |
| 4 | Lightspeed | Multi-location hospitality and retail POS. Stronger on inventory and back-of-house than Toast in some categories, weaker on US restaurant payments depth. The choice for groups that already run Lightspeed retail. |
| 5 | Square Appointments | Not a direct Toast competitor for restaurants, but routinely shows up when an operator also runs a salon-style booking surface (private rooms, classes, brewery tours). Adjacent rather than rival. |
Rank reflects Orbital’s read of restaurant POS deal cycles in 2026. The category is led by Toast on storefront count; the alternatives compete on price, contract length, hardware flexibility, or vertical fit.
Who buys this data
Who sells into Toast restaurants.
This page is for the teams selling into restaurant owners, GMs, and multi-unit operations leads who picked Toast, not the diners eating at those tables. If you ship one of the categories below, the Toast customer list is what your AE team has been asking for.
The long version
Detail, on demand.
Orbital is a custom agent platform, not a scraped list. To build the working list of restaurants running Toast, with a named buyer on every row, four agents run in sequence.
How the Toast customer list is built
- Tech stack agent. Crawls each candidate restaurant’s online ordering page, reservation surface, and payments fingerprints on demand. Confirms a Toast detection or rules it out. No static file, no six-month-old detection.
- Owner finder. Names the actual operator behind each location. For independent restaurants that is the owner or general manager; for multi-unit groups it is the chain operations lead, not a corporate procurement seat the AE team will never reach.
- Email waterfall. Returns a work email per record and verifies deliverability before it lands in your worklist. Bad rows do not ship.
- Phone intel. Adds a direct dial with a dial-or-skip read, so the SDR team knows which numbers are worth the queue and which to leave alone.
- ICP score. Grades each Toast account A to D against your fit formula, so a fleet vendor sees multi-location groups first and a single-location loyalty tool sees independent cafes first.
The result is a Toast customer worklist filterable by state, metro, restaurant format, and ICP score, with a named owner and a working number on every row. Tell us the cut you want when you ask for the sample.
Toast is restaurant-only and the customer mix reflects that. Full-service dining rooms, quick-service chains, independent coffee shops, neighbourhood bars, bakeries, and the growing class of multi-unit restaurant groups that started on Toast at one location and rolled the whole group onto it.
Sample customers reported by Toast and corroborated through location-level checks include Ike’s Love & Sandwiches, Alicart Group (Carmine’s), Slim & Husky’s Pizza Beeria, Casa del Barco, Taste of Belgium, Meizhou Dongpo, Paris Creperie, The Loyalist, Daily Creative Food Co., and Barkhaus. These are the names Toast clears for press; they are not the whole file.
The full customer list runs to the entire US restaurant install base on Toast and is the file vendors actually buy. Orbital resolves each location to a real operating business with format tags (full service, quick service, coffee shop, bar, bakery) and a named owner or GM on every row.
We believe
Toast publishes the install count. The useful file is location-by-location operators with a buyer on every row.
Toast is the default account list in restaurant B2B because the company reports live location counts and the category has no credible second place on storefront breadth. That makes every competing POS rep, loyalty vendor, capital provider, and broadliner supplier start here. The problem is not finding restaurants on Toast. The problem is finding the operator who signs for the tool you sell, at the location where the decision actually gets made.
Broker files tag the parent group and collapse fourteen general managers into one procurement seat that does not exist. Static tech-stack scrapes cache a Toast detection from six months ago while the operator switched twice. The Orbital cut runs the stack agent on demand, names the owner or GM, and ships a verified contact before the conversation starts. That is the difference between knowing Toast is big and having a worklist you can dial this week.
Do not buy this if any of the following are true.
You only sell to enterprise restaurant groups above 500 locations. The Toast customer list is long and most of it is independents and small multi-unit operators. If you sell one annual logo at a time to the top of the market, you want a named-account list and a strong relationship manager, not a long-tail map.
You sell to restaurant guests, not operators. If your buyer is the diner ordering a burger, you want consumer data, reservation traffic, or POS-bypass loyalty surfaces. The Toast file is owner-side and will not help you reach the table.
Your annual contract value floor sits above $100k. The single-location coffee shops and neighbourhood independents on Toast rarely sign a six-figure contract on day one. The mid-market and multi-unit cuts are the right slice; ask for those when you request the sample.
You need live processing volume per operator. Toast keeps that data inside its own walls and so does the operator’s acquiring bank. Orbital ships the buyer’s name, contact, and stack confirmation, not the GMV column. If you need card-flow data, that is a separate conversation with the operator.
If you Google “companies that use Toast” or “Toast POS customer list,” the top results are static broker files that aged six months on the way to your inbox. A restaurant that switched off Toast in November still sits in those files in June, and a restaurant that switched on to Toast in March is nowhere to be seen. The base churns. The file does not.
The second problem is rollup. Enterprise B2B databases tag the parent group and lose the buyer. A restaurant group with 14 locations on Toast shows up as one row at the holding-company address, and the 14 general managers who actually sign for Toast-adjacent tools collapse into a single procurement seat that does not exist. Your AE team calls the parent, hits a controller, and the deal stalls because the buyer was at the location level the whole time.
The third problem is detection method. Most tech-stack databases detect Toast by scraping a public order page tag once and caching the result for months. The page changes, the operator switches loyalty stack, the tag drops, and the detection still says Toast. By the time your SDR dials the number, the stack moved twice.
This is the gap Orbital sits in. We resolve each candidate location to a real operating restaurant, run the tech stack agent on demand against the live online ordering and payments surface, name the owner or general manager who actually picks the tools, and ship a verified contact before the conversation starts. The Toast customer list is current on the day you pull it, not on the day a broker exported the file. The same pattern works for SpotOn, Clover, Lightspeed, and Square. The platform changes; the playbook does not.
Questions
Before you ask sales about the Toast dataset.
What are the best Toast alternatives?
The closest Toast alternatives in the restaurant POS category are Clover, Lightspeed, SpotOn, Square, and Square Appointments. Toast is restaurant-only and runs on its own Android hardware. Clover and Square ship general-purpose POS hardware with restaurant modes, Lightspeed leans toward multi-location and hospitality, and SpotOn fights Toast head-on for independent and multi-unit operators. Which fits depends on whether the operator wants restaurant-native software or a generalist platform with a lower switching cost.
How many restaurants use Toast?
Toast reports live US restaurant locations as of Q1 2026 and is still adding roughly 7,000 net new locations per quarter. That pace makes it the category leader in US restaurant POS by storefront count. The customer base spans full-service restaurants, quick-service chains, independent coffee shops, bars, bakeries, and growing multi-unit groups. If you sell anything that touches a restaurant operator, this is the largest single account list in the category.
How do I get a list of companies that use Toast?
Orbital builds the Toast customer list on demand. The tech stack agent reads each candidate restaurant's online ordering, reservation, and payments surfaces and confirms a Toast detection. The owner finder names the operator behind the location. The email waterfall returns a verified work email and the phone intel agent adds a direct dial. You filter by state, metro, restaurant format, and ICP score, then export. The list is current on the day you pull it, not a static file that aged six months in a broker spreadsheet.
When is the Toast customer dataset the wrong fit?
Three cases. First, if you sell only to enterprise restaurant groups above 500 locations, the Toast file is too long and you want a named-account list instead. Second, if your motion is selling to restaurant guests rather than operators, you want consumer data and not a B2B vendor file. Third, if your annual contract value floor is above 100,000 dollars per logo, the long tail of independent Toast operators will not fit your unit economics. Save the budget and ask us when the mid-market overlay matters.
See the Toast customer dataset before you pay for it.
Tell us the states, restaurant formats, or multi-unit thresholds you want. We send a free sample of around 100 verified Toast operator records you can check against your own pipeline, no commitment, no email-list back-and-forth.
Get the sample