The Invisible
Giant

America’s second-largest private employer captures 60% of food spending while running on outdated infrastructure. It’s time for an upgrade.

By Dr. Gali Artzi, Nurit Ben, Nadav Berger, Tom Nicholson, and Peter Bodenheimer

I — In a Nutshell

Think of how you, your family, and your colleagues interact with food on an average day. Grabbing breakfast on the way to work and lunch during your break or heading to the office cafeteria. Dinner at a restaurant. Maybe it's the meals at your kids' elementary school or the myriad options at their university. The carefully curated food in hospital. On vacation it's the meals and snacks you get on the plane, the sandwich you buy at the airport or the catering on a cruise ship.

Food service is everywhere. An invisible giant that accounts for nearly 60% of all food expenditures in the U.S alone.1 America’s second largest private employer.2 A massive industry serving highly modern consumer needs and operating largely on post-WWII infrastructure. Post-Covid, the industry encountered not just recovering demand, but also stronger consumption patterns driven by delivery adoption, hybrid work, and consumers’ growing reliance on prepared meals.

"In all my time in this space, I've never seen so much turmoil, on all levels, all at once. It's been growth across the board, with movement at an urgency and speed that we have not experienced before. It puts us in a whole new era, that requires completely different solutions across the board."

Einav Gefen

SVP Global Culinary Talent & Culture, Compass Group; formerly Unilever & Restaurant Associates


The market is huge: North America's food service market totals about $1.1 trillion, set to hit $1.9 trillion by the early 2030s. Roughly 80–91% of that spend is commercial: restaurants, caterers, and bars, versus the non-commercial like schools, universities, and healthcare. Quick Serve Restaurants (QSR) make up ~48% of that, capturing disproportionate growth thanks to standardization, franchising, and off-premise dining. Delivery and drive-through have permanently reset operating models.

In this broader health reset, the GLP-1 story deserves an extra beat.



But that impressive growth is coming up against major (non-cyclical) constraints. Labor is a structural bottleneck that consumes around 30% of operating costs and has extraordinary turnover. Supply chains remain inefficient and structurally unstable: food costs surged over 55% from 2020–2022 and still haven't normalized. Data fragmentation is compounding both of those, with disconnected systems leaving operators with plenty of data, but little actionable insight.

The technology solutions that used to be simply optimization tools are now about solving structural problems. For investors, food service tech has moved from growth-at-all costs to revenue and margin durability. And capital is concentrating into fewer, larger platform bets with embedded distribution, transaction-based revenue, high retention, and cash-flow visibility.

"Food service continues to be an incredible opportunity because it's so vast. If you're going to scale a product in this segment, you can do it in so many different ways."

Phil Kafarakis · President and CEO, Food Away from Home Association

Broadly speaking, this is also a unique moment in time. Michiel Bakker is President of the Culinary Institute of America, a role he came into with decades of food service experience including transforming Google's food program.


"There is more attention being paid to what we eat than ever before. So there is no better time to affect change in the food system and in food."

Michiel Bakker

President, Culinary Institute of America; formerly Google


II — A Massive Market, Made Simple

Before drilling down into challenges and opportunities, it’s worth spending a bit of time on how food service actually works. The North American market (our focus here) is today about $1.1 trillion, with the U.S. valued at $0.91 trillion of that in 2025, and forecast to reach $1.7 trillion by 2031 at 10.64% CAGR.3 It’s broadly split into two major sectors: simply put, the places where consumers pay directly, and those where they don’t. Commercial food service includes quick-service restaurants, full-service restaurants, caterers, bars, and food service embedded in retail, lodging, aviation and cruises. In the non-commercial sector are schools, universities, healthcare facilities, business and industry cafeterias, military, and correctional services.

The two sides of food service differ sharply in incentive structure, decision-making speed, and technology adoption — but share a common supply chain and common cost pressures.


North America’s spending is overwhelmingly concentrated in the commercial side: as of 2024 it made up no less than 91% of all food away from home dollars in the U.S. Full service and quick service restaurants account for 73% of that,4 with the U.S. quick service market reaching ~$447.2 billion in 2025, and growth forecasted to ~$700 billion by 2030.5 Although spend is nearly evenly split, quick service formats benefit from higher technology adoption relative to full-service restaurants.

Non-commercial food service makes up a smaller share, accounting for the remaining ~9% of food away from home spend. Given the institutional structure, it's often defined by centralized procurement, lower menu volatility, and slower technology adoption (and not surprisingly, less focus from private and venture capital). But that doesn't mean there isn't opportunity.


"You can go to a university where there are multiple self-distributed operations in this country. That will expose you to thousands of students who would recognize your brand and take in your products. You could literally do that with one or two people and a very sophisticated culinary approach into maybe five universities across the country that have big mass meals, and all of a sudden you're in food service. It's not easy, but it's a lot faster."

President and CEO

Phil Kafarakis · CEO, Food Away from Home Association


Each side of the industry has its own distinct pressure points and incentives, different decision-making speeds and flexibility to technology adoption. But they do share some fundamental things in common, which inform the opportunities for innovation and investment: Both share a common supply chain, from the grower to the processor, distributor and operator. There's dependence on labor at every step. Rising costs across the board, including food, labor, energy, and compliance. And a limited ability to pass costs to the end consumer. That makes for significant opportunities in the shared infrastructure nobody sees: the systems that connect supply chains, manage labor, and enable operators to make better decisions faster.

Driving the Growth

Economic data consistently shows that dining out scales with wealth: as household income rises, consumers spend more in absolute terms on food outside the home and allocate a larger share of their food budgets to restaurants and prepared meals.6 But it’s driven by more than disposable income alone. Urbanization, changing lifestyles, and the increasing value of consumers’ time have steadily moved eating from the home kitchen into restaurants, cafés, and other food service venues. Add to that five more factors:7

Despite those factors helping drive growth, the gap between where things are and where they need to be is still significant.


III — Three Core Problems

"There is permanent margin compression. If you think about the economics, labor cost, minimum wage, healthcare, the cost of goods; it's not just food and beverage, it's packaging. It's rent, insurance, utilities, compliance costs."

Michiel Bakker · President, Culinary Institute of America


Problems across the food service industry are getting worse faster than operators can adapt, and the margin for error is evaporating along with them. Here we'll focus on three fundamental issues at play: labor, supply chain cost and complexity, and decision making without intelligence.

Problem #1: Labor as the Hard Constraint

"I've been in the restaurant business for more than 30 years, and there has never been a time when labor wasn't a challenge."

Michael "Schatzy" Schatzberg · Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Branded Hospitality Ventures

It is a structural problem made worse post-COVID, when millions of hospitality workers exited the industry for adjacent sectors offering higher wages, predictable schedules, and clearer advancement paths. Add tighter immigration policies cutting access to foreign labor, and what emerged is a fundamentally new labor market where scarcity is embedded in the operating model. Even as headline employment has recovered, restaurants report elevated vacancy rates and persistent turnover despite rising wages. Worker preferences have shifted permanently toward flexibility and stability, neither of which are hallmarks of traditional food service roles.

Wage Inflation & Cost Pressure

Labor typically represents 30–35% of restaurant operating expenses, second only to food costs. 8 Wage inflation is now widespread: 88% of restaurants experienced rising staff expenses in 2024. With profit margins at just 3–5% of sales, even modest wage increases compress profitability disproportionately. 9 The pressure is particularly acute for small independents with limited ability to absorb costs. Structural labor shortages compound the problem. About 75% of U.S. restaurants now use staffing agencies to fill scheduling gaps, often paying above standard in-house rates, a premium layer of cost on top of rising base wages. 10 Compensation and workplace standards have reset upward, raising the industry’s structural cost base without solving the underlying shortage.

The Turnover Trap

"There's extraordinarily high turnover relative to other industries. It's a big issue because even if you bring in more technology, it assumes you're able to train the new workforce on it. And I think that's one of the structural issues."

Michiel Bakker · President, Culinary Institute of America

Industry-wide employee turnover averages around 75% annually; in fast food it exceeds 150%. 11 Cornell research estimates replacing a single employee costs $5,864 in recruitment, onboarding, and lost productivity. For a 100-employee restaurant at industry-average turnover, that’s over $450,000 a year. 12
The revenue impact is direct: 59% of operators reported operating below full capacity in 2024 due to labor challenges. In a business where incremental revenue carries limited marginal cost, reduced hours, closed dining rooms, and shortened menus suppress revenue potential when operators need it most. 13

Problem #2: Supply Chain Complexity & Cost Volatility

"The true cost of food, the complexities of how many hands food needs to change before it gets from where it originated to its end, is mind boggling. Especially when we should also think of the environmental impacts like carbon emissions, food waste and packaging, the inefficiencies are just unbelievable."

Einav Gefen · SVP Global Culinary Talent & Culture, Compass Group

Many of those inefficiencies are deliberately hidden. "To subsidize the fact that they're losing money on delivery, many distributors need to put money into their bottom line, and they do it by keeping the supply chain opaque," says Dinesh Guzdar, Managing Director at Rich Products Corporate Venture Fund. "It is difficult to know where your products are sold and at what price. That's changing because restaurateurs and technology are getting smarter and creating transparency for the entire food service supply chain."

Wage Inflation & Cost Pressure

Despite the complexity, procurement remains stunningly outdated. Many restaurants, particularly independents and smaller chains, still rely on phone or email ordering across multiple suppliers. Spend visibility is fragmented across locations, with POS systems, inventory tools, and accounting platforms operating in silos. Manual invoicing consumes significant back-office labor. This fragmentation produces three systemic inefficiencies: operators lack negotiating power to secure volume discounts without consolidated spend visibility; manual ordering based on intuition increases food waste; and invoicing errors, duplicate payments, and missed early-payment discounts bleed an estimated 2–5% of procurement spend. 1415
The impact scales with operator size: Smaller independents lack volume leverage, limiting negotiation power and margin potential. Mid-sized groups face coordination costs as disparate systems prevent unified reporting. Enterprises struggle to integrate legacy systems with newer tools without disrupting existing workflows. 1617

Persistent Cost Inflation

Food costs nearly doubled during 2020–2022, with the FAO Food Price Index rising more than 55%. 18 And those costs remain structurally elevated: 86% of restaurants reported increased food costs in 2024, and 27% cite food cost inflation as their primary challenge for 2025, second only to labor. 1920 The drivers are structural. Weather-driven volatility, labor shortages in agriculture and processing, and persistent transportation costs suggest supply-side instability is here to stay.

Problem #3: Decision-Making Without Intelligence

Add to all the above a third less visible, but fundamental problem: most restaurant operators lack access to the integrated operational data they need for smart decision-making. They're drowning in data but starving for answers.

Fragmentation & Systems-Level Failure

Even operators using modern POS systems typically manage data across disconnected platforms: scheduling software records labor hours and shifts; accounting platforms house invoices and P&L data; loyalty systems store guest profiles and order history. Predictive insights exist (think weather patterns, historical demand, seasonal pricing), but operators manually cross-reference everything rather than receiving actionable recommendations. Every system generates reports; none tells them what to do in real time.

The numbers reveal the dysfunction: roughly 3 in 10 restaurants use digital tools that don’t communicate with each other, requiring manual data transfer across platforms.21 This fragmentation increases managerial cognitive load, forcing reactive labor allocation instead of proactive optimization, which spikes error rates, burnout, and service quality. Data integration and real-time operational visibility are increasingly cited as critical gaps that prevent proactive management.22

Adoption Gaps

But the reluctance is rational. Thin margins leave little room for error, and day-to-day operations rarely slow down enough to allow for intentional decision-making. The promise of tools that streamline operations is compelling, but the path to AI implementation can feel risky, expensive, and overwhelming, particularly when short term costs and workflow disruptions threaten the stability and consistency that daily success requires.24

IV — Solutions That Matter

Technology responses to the industry's labor, supply chain, and decision-making constraints can be broken down into three broad categories that differ not only in functionality but in strategic role: some solve discrete bottlenecks, others attempt to re-architect the operating model itself. But first we might ask: why have so many solutions failed here before?

Tech companies tend to arrive with solutions to problems they don't understand, built for workflows that don't exist. There's also an integration problem: large operators can't function like tech companies; they have existing systems, platform dependencies, and competing vendor relationships. They need plug-and-play solutions that work across tech stacks.

"I think many try to do too much at once. 'I'm going to help your order planning. I'm going to be your production, your kitchen system.' I think that's where they fail. You've got to be very focused. The operators, even the chains, are driven by their day-to-day business. So technology is not going to be top of mind for them every day. Having industry knowledge is really important."

Dinesh Guzdar · Managing Director, Rich Products Corporate Venture Fund

What does work? Solutions that solve immediate problems, deliver clear ROI, fit existing workflows, and are built by people who understand how the system works. Power sits with distributors (like Sysco, US Foods, Gordon Food Service), contract caterers (Compass, Aramark, Sodexo), and CPGs with distribution control. That means product-market fit must include the buyer, who isn't the end user. And enterprise partnerships scale faster than site-by-site sales, so distribution strategy is key.

Labor Efficiency Tools

What They Replace & Why it Matters

These replace manual spreadsheets, ad-hoc text threads, static availability assumptions, and manager intuition, all challenges faced in current labor scheduling. Directly addressed is the industry's most binding constraint: staffing variability. When schedules align to real demand, overstaffing diminishes, shift conflicts decline, and managers reclaim time previously spent on manual coordination.

How They Work

AI-enabled scheduling platforms integrate with POS systems to translate historical and real-time demand signals into labor decisions. Core capabilities include demand forecasting by hour, daypart, seasonality, weather, and local events; calculation of optimal staffing levels within labor budgets; automated schedule generation that respects labor laws and employee preferences; and real-time alerts that flag understaffing risk and recommend adjustments. Leading platforms claim demand-forecast accuracy exceeding 90%, allowing schedules to reflect actual demand rather than historical averages.

Who's the Buyer?

Multi-unit operators (5+ locations), quick service chains, emerging full-service restaurant groups, and franchisees managing network obligations.

The Limitations

Tools that fail to integrate cleanly with legacy POS or back-office systems require manual reconciliation, eroding expected efficiency gains. Staff training and change management also remain constraints. Success depends less on being cutting-edge than on fitting tech strategically to the customer base operators serve. 25

Select Companies to Watch

7shifts

The dedicated labor management platform includes POS integration and compliance automation. Fresh Restaurants, a six-location Canadian operator, deployed 7shifts to manage scheduling for approximately 400 employees. The results: 12% labor cost reduction (3.5 percentage points of sales), 13% increase in labor productivity (sales per labor hour), and 95% sales forecast accuracy.26 $143 million raised to date.

Supply Chain & Procurement Intelligence

"The greatest opportunity in tech for my dollar would be in demand planning and forecasting. To forecast demand, plug it into your supply chain, make it go all the way down into your transportation, into your production, into your raw material procurement. There's still a huge void in that space. And if you really start to understand demand planning, you can impact labor. You can impact margin around food waste, you can impact capacity during peak times. An abundance of positive implications."

Phil Kafarakis · CEO, Food Away from Home Association

What They Replace & Why it Matters

These replace phone and email-based ordering, fragmented purchase orders, manual invoice processing, and siloed spend tracking across systems. All fundamentally clarify crucial decisions of what to buy, from whom, and when.

How They Work

Cloud-based procurement platforms centralize supplier management and automate the full procure-to-pay lifecycle. Capabilities typically include consolidated ordering across locations, AI-driven invoice capture and line-item extraction via OCR, automated PO and receipt matching, discrepancy flagging, payment processing with early-pay discount optimization, and spend analytics by vendor, category, and location. Advanced platforms also support strategic sourcing and RFx workflows to lock in pricing. These solutions can also have a significant impact on reducing food waste and improving margins, by boosting efficiency in purchasing decisions.

Who's the Buyer?

Multi-location chains (20+ units), franchise systems, large independent groups, and hospitality operators with meaningful procurement volume.

The Limitations

Procurement automation yields different economics at different operator scales. Smaller independents benefit most from baseline visibility and error reduction but often lack procurement volume to unlock significant discounts. Mid-sized groups gain disproportionately from spend consolidation and centralized PO matching, reducing manual AP effort and error rates. Larger enterprise chains, while having leverage, face integration costs when aligning procurement platforms with existing ERP and POS ecosystems; successful deployments often require phased rollouts and cross-functional governance to realize ROI.27

Select Companies to Watch

Ottimate

AP automation and payments for restaurants, hotels and country clubs, featuring line-item AI extraction and a VendorPay network. $167 million raised to date.


GrubMarket

An AI-powered food supply chain and procurement platform, working with restaurants, food service operators, grocery wholesalers and produce distributors. $670 million raised to date.


Orbisk

A hardware enabled SaaS company that uses AI powered computer vision to automatically monitor and reduce food waste in commercial kitchens. With over 1,000 systems deployed across 50+ countries, Orbisk serves enterprise hospitality groups, contract catering operators, and cruise lines, helping them achieve measurable waste reduction, cost savings, and ESG compliance without requiring any manual input from kitchen teams. A PeakBridge portfolio company, with €12.1 million raised to date.

Intelligent Operating Platforms

"No matter where you worked — Gap, Walmart, or a bar — inventory was the job everyone hated, and it was only as accurate as the person counting. Now we're seeing AI-powered tools that can make inventory far more precise and even help operators optimize purchasing by understanding space, shelf capacity, and product dimensions."

Michael "Schatzy" Schatzberg · Co-Founder & Managing Partner, Branded Hospitality Ventures

What They Replace & Why it Matters

These replace disparate point solutions for POS, labor, inventory, procurement, and accounting that operate in silos, requiring manual reconciliation and producing reports instead of actionable decisions. Plus, manual reporting workflows, standalone analytics tools, and fragmented systems that leave operators data-rich but insight-poor.

The food service industry lacks a fundamental operating system. For a 10-location group, unified platforms can eliminate approximately five hours per week of manual reporting. Queries like "labor cost as a percentage of sales by location" are answered instantly using live data rather than spreadsheets assembled after the fact.

How They Work

Unified Platforms consolidate POS and payments, labor management, inventory and procurement, customer engagement, and analytics into a single system with shared data architecture. Information flows automatically across modules, eliminating the need to reconcile data across systems and enabling operators to manage the entire business from one interface.

Who's the Buyer?

Independent restaurants and small-to-mid-sized chains (5–50 units) seeking standardization and managerial efficiency; growth-stage operators and tech-forward multi-unit groups needing decision automation at scale; enterprise chains pursuing end-to-end integration to eliminate fragmentation that amplifies margin erosion.

The Limitations

These platforms streamline data flow and reduce reconciliation work, improving transparency and enabling faster decision-making. But operators often trade specialized functionality for unified simplicity: specialized point solutions may offer richer workflows for specific functions that all-in-one suites can't match out of the box. Many operators adopt hybrid stacks: a core integrated platform for foundational data unity, supplemented with specialized point solutions or AI layers for specific functions. The choice reflects operator maturity and priorities: emergent operators optimize discrete functions first; growth-stage groups layer intelligence for coordination; scaled chains pursue end-to-end integration to eliminate fragmentation that previously amplified margin erosion.

Select Companies to Watch

Toast

A cloud-based, all-in-one digital technology platform and POS system for the restaurant industry, including payments, labor, and inventory, with enterprise-grade reliability and serving over 156,000 locations. $2.1 billion raised to date.


Omnivore (now an Olo subsidiary)

An API layer for guest experience featuring order integration, third-party integration, and over 500 POS and platform integrations. $18 million raised to date.


Tabit

A mobile-first, cloud-native POS and operating platform for full-service restaurants, with a vertical AI layer purpose-built for hospitality. By capturing clean, real-time data at the point of service, they enable AI-driven decision-making across labor, demand, and operations. $105 million raised to date.

Hybrid Ingredient Solutions

What They Replace & Why it Matters

Hybrid ingredient solutions partially replace volatile or supply-constrained food commodities (most notably ground meat and cocoa) with alternative ingredients designed to preserve the functional properties of the original product, including texture, moisture retention, flavor absorption and binding properties. Commodity volatility remains one of the most persistent pressures in food service economics, and hybrid ingredient solutions provide several operational advantages. Those include cost reduction, supply resilience, operational compatibility (preserving existing kitchen workflows and menus), and scalable financial impact, even with small formulation changes.

How They Work

Several technical approaches are used to create ingredients as drop-in components, to integrate into existing production systems and kitchen workflows without requiring new equipment or major recipe changes.

Who's the Buyer?

The primary buyers are organizations operating at scale and therefore exposed to commodity price volatility, including multi-unit restaurant groups and quick-service chains, institutional food service providers (schools, universities, healthcare, corporate dining), food manufacturers producing frozen or prepared meals, contract caterers and centralized commissary kitchens, and broadline food distributors that determine ingredient availability across operator networks.29
Institutional foodservice represents a particularly large opportunity: take the U.S. National School Lunch Program, serving roughly 30 million meals a day.30

The Limitations

Despite their operational advantages, hybrid ingredient solutions do involve several trade-offs. Taste and texture can vary, and even small differences in flavor or mouthfeel can limit adoption in consumer-facing menu items. Consumer perception is also something to consider, particularly with blended meat products framed as ‘fillers.’ Regulations and labeling also may provide a hurdle: combining animal and non-animal ingredients can fall under different frameworks depending on formulation and processing methods, which may affect labeling requirements and approval timelines.31

Select Companies to Watch

50CUT (JOYN Foods)

Produces a hybrid meat-blending ingredient designed to help food service operators reduce meat usage while maintaining taste and cooking performance. The mycelium-based ingredient can cost 25–30% less than the cheapest commodity beef in the US, enabling operators to partially replace ground meat while lowering ingredient costs and improving nutritional profiles. $10.78 million raised to date.32

Fiber Foods

Develops clean-label, whole-food ingredients sourced and processed in Africa including PrimeJack®, a dehydrated jackfruit ingredient designed for seamless integration into large-scale food manufacturing. A PeakBridge portfolio company with €2.3 million raised to date.


Win-Win

Develops cocoa-free chocolate ingredients to provide manufacturers with alternatives to traditional cocoa amid rising prices and supply volatility. The products can be used as 1:1 replacements in bakery, confectionery, and dessert applications. A PeakBridge portfolio company with $10.65 million raised to date.33

 

The breadth of the food service landscape and the challenges it faces means there are important areas we haven’t explored in depth here, including food safety and allergens. These remain critical considerations in the market, and companies addressing them are also tackling meaningful and growing opportunities.


V — The Investor Lens

Funding in food service technology has shifted from volume to selectivity: 2024 and 2025 show fewer deals, more concentrated late-stage capital, and stronger investor preference for scaled platforms with clear ROI, while early 2026 signals suggest that discipline is continuing rather than reversing. Scaled platforms with defensible economics, embedded distribution, and successful monetization are attracting both strategic buyers and private equity. Speculative early-stage ventures face extended fundraising cycles or consolidation pressure.

Q1 2025 saw $1.4 billion deployed across 202 food tech deals, signalling sustained capital appetite despite broader macro caution.34 In 2024 it was $10.6 billion deployed across 1,065 deals, up 9.6% YoY in total dollars, but down 30% YoY in deal count — indicating fewer, larger, and higher conviction checks were written in 2024.35


Fintech Meets FoodTech

The biggest transactions in food service technology increasingly sit at the intersection of operations and financial infrastructure. Payments, accounts payable, and wage access platforms are commanding disproportionate capital relative to standalone operational software. Toast is one strong example. The company does conversational AI for restaurants, monetizing primarily through gross payment volume rather than pure SaaS subscriptions. In Q3 2025, Toast processed $51.5 billion in GPV, generating recurring, transaction-linked revenue streams that scale with customer throughput rather than seat count. This model embeds monetization directly into restaurant cash flow, creating resilience under pricing pressure.36

Fintech-adjacent models (payments, AP, wage access) with per-transaction economics benefit from high throughput which creates a ‘rising-tide’ revenue stream. Pure seat-based SaaS depends on ARR/seat and is more sensitive to churn and compression.3738

M&A and Consolidation

Two distinct buyer archetypes are dominating here: strategic and financial buyers. Strategics are consolidating omnichannel or payment capabilities; private equity buyers are seeking cash flow, margin expansion, and portfolio synergies. Potential strategic acquirers include food service operators (like Compass, Aramark, Sodexo); distributors including Sysco, US Foods, Gordon Food Service; CPGs seeking distribution control and customer proximity, technology companies expanding into vertical solutions, and private equity.

Olo → Omnivore (February 2022): Olo acquired Omnivore, an API layer connecting restaurants to hundreds of third-party solutions, to consolidate its omnichannel guest experience proposition. This acquisition expanded Olo’s partner network by 50%+ and derisked Olo’s platform lock-in strategy.39
DoorDash → Deliveroo (May 2025, £2.4B enterprise value): 404142 DoorDash’s acquisition of Deliveroo represents international consolidation in delivery infrastructure. Deliveroo shareholders received 180p per share (44% premium), though this fell far below the company’s March 2021 IPO price of 390p.
Coca-Cola + Toast IQ (2025): Toast partnered with Coca-Cola to develop AI-powered beverage optimization features within Toast IQ, directly integrated into the Toast platform. This represents a new model: beverage companies (Coca-Cola, Pepsi) paying to embed intelligence within POS platforms.43

Financial buyers like private equity have also become increasingly active in restaurant technology M&A, acquiring mature SaaS platforms and optimizing for free cash flow and cost synergies across portfolios. Among the deals is the sector’s landmark PE transaction: Thoma Bravo’s $2 billion acquisition of Olo in mid-2025.4445 Olo operates at scale (88,000 locations pre-deal), and benefits from the labor-constrained restaurant industry’s shift to digital channels.46 Also announced in 2025 was the TPG Capital (private equity arm of TPG Inc.) acquisition of Sabre’s Hospitality Solutions SaaS business, with strategic minority co-investment from MCR Hotel Group. This reflects PE interest in travel & hospitality tech.​

VI — What's Investible

Much has been written about a coming "SaaSpocalypse": the idea that AI reduces the barriers to writing software, flooding the market with new entrants and destroying pricing power. The food service vertical is not immune to this. But historical precedent suggests this is an opportunity rather than a collapse.

When Salesforce launched in 1999 to disrupt Oracle, a reasonable assumption was that legacy enterprise software was dead. Oracle's market cap was $30 billion then; it exceeds $400 billion today. Enterprise SaaS now represents roughly $3 trillion in market capitalisation. The market expanded dramatically. The big legacy players survived. The internet followed the same pattern: hundreds of companies fifteen years ago, consolidated today into a few trillion-dollar platforms. Food service technology is at the same inflection point; a structural technology shift creating new entrants, brief fragmentation, then rapid consolidation into scaled winners.

But AI does compress the value of generic software features. Building a scheduling tool or analytics dashboard is dramatically cheaper than it was two years ago, and simple point solutions with shallow integration are genuinely exposed. The mistake is assuming this applies equally to all software businesses.

"What matters now is whether a company sells the tool or sells the work. When AI makes building software cheap, the value shifts from the tool itself to the outcome it delivers."

PeakBridge

Toast and Square understood this early, and anchored revenue to payments instead of monthly software fees. The pricing question in food is moving from "what does the software cost per location" to "what measurable return does it deliver on procurement, labor, or waste?" Companies that tie revenue to operator outcomes have a fundamentally different competitive position than those selling subscriptions to replicable features.

"Don't just focus on the biggest, shiniest and most technology-driven solution. Be pragmatic and settle for 80% of the technical capabilities and spend the other 20% on how to use it. It's not, can you add five more features? It's your ability to figure out a way to get time and attention with those who are going to use it. Ask: How will this product or solution be used in an existing ecosystem and with existing systems? And how do you bring the operator along?"

Michiel Bakker · President, Culinary Institute of America

Three Categories of Durability

In practice, food service technology companies now fall into three categories of durability.

For investors, the question is not whether food service tech will produce large outcomes. A $1.1 to $1.9 trillion industry with sub-20% technology penetration, structural labour constraints, and persistent margin pressure guarantees that.

Selection is what matters, and our framework is built around five filters: does the product have deep segment ownership or cross-segment scalability; does it fix a measurable operational problem; does it integrate with existing workflows; and is the payback within the operator's budget cycle. A fifth filter separates durable businesses from compounding ones: does the company sit at a data layer that gets more valuable over time? Proprietary, high-volume, and actionable data creates a moat that features alone cannot. Every operator added makes the platform smarter. That's a fundamentally different competitive position.

In a market where new systems can be built in record time, metrics matter more than ever. For operating businesses, we need to see evidence of saving operators time and money: dollars recovered, hours saved, waste reduced, purchasing efficiency improved. For companies positioned as acquisition targets, distribution also matters: how many operators you can reach and how quickly. The companies that win in food service tech will be those that can point to measurable operational impact, or in the case of consolidation plays, demonstrate distribution density that makes them strategically indispensable.

The consolidation wave in food service technology is already underway, and if history is anything to go by, the recent technology shifts will likely increase the size of the market and increase the consolidation significantly over the next few years. Identifying where in the stack the next winner will emerge is the art and science to generate outsized returns.


Notes & Sources

1. https://restaurant.org/research-and-media/research/industry-statistics/state-statistics/

2. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/us-food-service-restaurant-market
3. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-markets-prices/food-service-industry/market-segments
4. https://www.restroworks.com/blog/quick-service-restaurant-industry-statistics/ — Purdue University Center for Food Demand Analysis & Sustainability. Dining Dollars: How Income Shapes Where We Eat Out. https://ag.purdue.edu/cfdas/data/dining-dollars-income-shapes-where-we-eat-out/
5. https://www.mordorintelligence.com/industry-reports/north-america-foodservice-market
6. https://www.foodnhotelasia.com/blog/horeca/problems-in-food-service-industry/
7. https://www.bluebookservices.com/restaurant-industry-survey-shows-labor-sales-challenges-in-2025/
8. https://zipdo.co/restaurants-hospitality-industry-statistics
9. https://www.restroworks.com/blog/restaurant-turnover-statistics/
10. https://higherme.com/blog/the-real-cost-of-restaurant-turnover-5864-per-employee-and-how-to-reduce-it
11. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/restaurant365s-state-of-the-restaurant-industry-survey…
12. https://www.prokwin.com/2024/09/01/the-impact-of-ignoring-procurement-digitalization-in-the-middle-east — McKinsey: Mitigating procurement value leakage with generative AI
13. https://www.netsuite.com/portal/resource/articles/erp/supply-chain-management-hospitality-industry.shtml
14. https://restaurant.org/nra/media/restaurant-2030/restaurant2030.pdf
15. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/economy/global-food-prices-inflation.html
16. https://www.restaurant365.com/in-the-news/restaurant365s-state-of-the-restaurant-industry-survey…
17. https://www.fsrmagazine.com/growth/finance/the-state-of-restaurants-in-2025-labor-and-food-costs…
18. https://www.7shifts.com/restaurant-digital-prep-list
19. https://restaurant.org/nra/media/restaurant-2030/restaurant2030.pdf
20. https://www.msra.org/uploads/2/2/5/4/22540394/natrestassoc_techlandscapereport_2024.pdf
21. https://bepbackoffice.com/blog/challenges-of-ai-in-the-food-industry/
22. https://restaurant.org/education-and-resources/resource-library/new-report-examines-the-technology-landscape…
23. https://www.7shifts.com/blog/fresh-restaurants-7shifts-case-study/
24. https://supy.io/blog/building-the-ideal-restaurant-tech-stack-tools-every-modern-restaurant-needs
25. https://www.mycoiq.com/category/press-release/ — Sysco FY24 Sustainability Report
26. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/chart-detail?chartId=104891
27. https://www.fda.gov/food/meat-guidance-documents-regulatory-information/fda-regulated-meats-and-meat-products-human-consumption
28. https://my.pitchbook.com/profile/483925-06/company/profile
29. https://my.pitchbook.com/profile/491628-70/company/profile
30. https://www.landbase.com/blog/fastest-growing-food-tech-companies
31. https://www.vestbee.com/insights/articles/the-state-of-foodtech-in-2025-investment-opportunities-and-key-risks
32. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251104192374/en/Toast-Announces-Third-Quarter-2025-Financial-Results
33. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20251104192374/en/Toast-Announces-Third-Quarter-2025-Financial-Results
34. https://medium.com/fintech-payment-solutions-pos-systems-digital/the-unit-economics-of-the-payments-business-72752cfa5946
35. https://app.dealroom.co/companies/omnivore
36. https://ir.doordash.com/news/news-details/2025/DoorDash-Releases-First-Quarter-2025-Financial-Results/default.aspx
37. https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/doordash-announces-agreement-acquire-deliveroo-2025-05-06
38. https://www.restaurantonline.co.uk/Article/2025/05/06/deliveroo-agrees-29bn-sale-to-us-delivery-firm-doordash/
39. https://www.nasdaq.com/press-release/toast-expands-toast-iq-smart-features-smart-ai-assistant-2025-10-29
40. https://www.thomabravo.com/press-releases/olo-enters-into-definitive-agreement-to-be-acquired-by-thoma-bravo
41. https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/thoma-bravo-buy-olo-deal-valuing-restaurant-tech-firm-2-billion-2025-07-03/
42. https://www.thomabravo.com/press-releases/olo-enters-into-definitive-agreement-to-be-acquired-by-thoma-bravo
43. https://middlemarketgrowth.org/pe-weekly-saas-fundraising-dealmaking-hospitality-restaurant/