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Toast Profile: Pandemic Layoffs, Business Model, and Current Status

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The profile

Toast, the Boston restaurant point-of-sale and payments company, cut half its staff in April 2020: its IPO registration later put the reduction at about 48 percent laid off and 12 percent furloughed. Toast then lobbied Congress for restaurant relief, and in April 2021 it announced a partnership with the SBA to help its customers apply to the $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund. Its registration statement says Toast's "sustained actions throughout 2020 played a role" in creating that fund.

  • Category: restaurants, food, and local commerce
  • Pandemic-layoff role: Deepest-cut ranking company
  • Last updated: 2026-09-25

Founders, executives and investors

Chris Comparato was chief executive in 2020. Aman Narang was chief executive by February 2024 and signed the company's annual report for 2024. Before the pandemic Toast was last valued at $5 billion and had raised more than $900 million in venture capital, TechCrunch reported, citing Crunchbase. It filed to go public on August 27, 2021, and its Class A shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

Business before the pandemic

Toast sells restaurants the hardware and software to take orders and payments: handheld ordering pads, self-service kiosks and kitchen display screens, tied to its payment processing. It also lends to restaurants through Toast Capital. It sold mainly to independent restaurants. TechCrunch reported that Comparato cited 109 percent revenue growth in 2019.

During the pandemic

Massachusetts's 2020 WARN report lists a notice from Toast, received April 9, 2020, of a layoff dated April 8 affecting 736 people in Boston. Toast's IPO registration statement, filed 16 months later, gave the company-wide figure: in April 2020 Toast furloughed about 12 percent of its employees and "terminated approximately 48% of our employees in connection with a reduction in force." It also re-prioritized capital projects, froze hiring company-wide for a time and cut management salaries. Toast booked $10.1 million of 2020 costs, including severance, to the workforce reduction and $2.8 million to ending leases early, and added both back when it calculated adjusted EBITDA.

Most of Toast's 2020 revenue, $644.4 million of $823.1 million, came from financial technology solutions, which include payment processing. Its processing fee is generally a percentage of each transaction plus a fixed per-transaction fee, and the registration statement ties that revenue's growth to payment volume. On March 18, 2020 Toast's Rally for Restaurants site reported, from Toast platform data, that "restaurant sales have now declined by 68% nationwide." The registration statement later said weekly same-store restaurant sales nationwide "plummeted nearly 75% virtually overnight" once states shut dining rooms in March 2020. Toast's gross payment volume fell 24 percent in the second quarter of 2020 from a year earlier.

Chief executive Chris Comparato wrote in a blog post, reported by TechCrunch on April 7, 2020, that the company was "in the unenviable position of reducing our headcount." Laid-off staff were offered severance, benefits coverage, mental health support and a longer window to buy vested stock options, and TechCrunch reported that Toast also pulled back job offers. Comparato's annual on-target cash pay was cut 50 percent: his bonus opportunity was eliminated and his annual base salary was reduced by $32,500. Bonus opportunities were restored on July 1, 2020 and base salaries on August 3.

Customers got software credits. Toast "waived subscription fees of over $20 million for our entire customer base," the registration statement says, and COVID-related credits and refunded fees partly offset the growth in 2020 subscription revenue, which still rose 62 percent to $101.4 million. Toast also launched Toast Delivery Services, the digital-only Toast Now platform and contactless Order & Pay. Its Rally for Restaurants campaign asked diners to order takeout and buy gift cards, and Toast.org pledged $1 per eligible social media post, up to $250,000, split evenly between the Restaurant Workers' Community Foundation and World Central Kitchen.

Toast Capital services working-capital loans that a partner bank makes to Toast customers. Toast must buy back loans from a given quarter that are charged off or non-performing, up to 15 percent of that quarter's original principal; for a limited winter 2020–21 program tied to the pandemic, the cap was 30 percent. In December 2020 Toast announced a "Toast Restaurant Recovery Fund" of one-month software credits for current customers, limited-time free access to its online ordering, payroll and marketing products, and access to Toast Capital funding. Toast put the package at $35 million.

In April 2020 the Rally site's CARES Act guide said "Toast is not affiliated with the United States Small Business Administration" and that it did not act as a lender or referral agent for SBA lenders. SBA's public PPP loan data list no loan to a Toast-named borrower in Massachusetts. By May the site carried a letter to the four congressional leaders, signed by Comparato and 22 others, including the chief executives of Nextdoor, OpenTable and Tripadvisor. It said "a bipartisan follow-up to the CARES Act will be critical" and asked for a choice of PPP forgiveness window, changes to the permitted uses of PPP money and to forgiveness rules, and a mandate that business-interruption insurance cover COVID-19 losses, with the government reinsuring insurers under a "PRIA (Pandemic Risk Insurance Act)." In December Comparato said "Toast remains hopeful that our lobbying efforts to pass the RESTAURANTS Act will result in a positive outcome for the industry."

The American Rescue Plan Act established the Restaurant Revitalization Fund. Toast's April 22, 2021 release announced an SBA partnership for the $28.6 billion fund, promising Toast customers "a simplified application process for RRF grant applications by May 2021." It quoted Nick DeLeonardis, a Toast senior vice president: the company had "written letters to Congress, actively lobbied to help secure this funding for the restaurant industry." SBA's program page listed Toast among its point-of-sale channels: "If you are working with Square or Toast, you do not need to register beforehand on the application portal." The registration statement went further: "We believe our sustained actions throughout 2020 played a role in the eventual development and passing of the $28.6 billion Restaurant Revitalization Fund."

Toast raised its own cash from investors: $402.4 million, net of issuance costs, from Series F preferred stock in the first half of 2020, and $200 million of 8.5 percent convertible notes issued on June 19, 2020. It prepaid the notes on June 21, 2021 for $248.7 million in cash and issued warrants for 1,622,717 Class B shares in connection with the prepayment. Payment volume for 2020 still rose 17 percent, from $21.8 billion to $25.4 billion, and annualized recurring run-rate rose from $184 million to $326 million. Takeout shifted the mix toward card-not-present payments, which the registration statement says typically earn Toast more than card-present ones. The net loss widened to $248.2 million from $209.4 million. Toast's IPO prospectus, dated September 21, 2021, offered 21,739,131 new Class A shares at $40.00 each, $869,565,240 before underwriting discounts. At the end of 2021 Toast had 3,172 employees.

After the first shock

In February 2024 Toast laid off about 550 employees, roughly 10 percent of its staff, in a restructuring to lower operating costs. "Toast grew rapidly over the past few years to support our growing customer community," Narang said.

Since 2025

Toast's annual report for 2024, filed on February 26, 2025, showed net income of $19 million, against a net loss of $246 million in 2023. Annualized recurring run-rate was $1,626 million at the end of 2024, up 34 percent, and the company had about 5,700 employees.

Sources

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