Tacombi is Optimized for the Empire State Building with Toast

Luis Berenbau, Tacombi’s Director of Operations, was on a pursuit with his operations team to incorporate new technology into their locations. As the bridge between store level operations and headquarters, he was committed to finding a solution that could streamline high volume across each location.

Centralized Platform for Real-Time Data on a Reliable Network

Before finding Toast, Tacombi operated on Micros, which proved to be challenging due to their lack of support, inability to view reporting in real-time, and difficulty changing menus across multiple locations. “We had to travel to and from each of the stores to manually change menus and generate reports to be consolidated for our financial team,” Luis says.

This cumbersome and antiquated reporting method ultimately led him to search for a cloud-based system. “Toast is cloud-based, so we can update menus at any location and gather real-time data to see how the other stores are performing.”

Impeccable Customer Care

Frustrated with the sluggish and costly response times from Micros’ support team, Luis made it a priority to find a solution that took customer support as seriously as he did.

“With Micros, if you’d call customer support, it would take four hours before you’d get a call back. With Toast, if you call in, you’re actually speaking with someone in Customer Care within minutes,” Luis says. “They’ll always solve your problem on the fly. We don’t have four hours to spare when we need to fix something right away.”

While some of Tacombi’s locations were on service contracts with Micros and others were not, Luis still found himself paying up to $500 each time he needed to speak with a Micros support agent.

“They would charge us to explain how to do something over the phone and wouldn’t come into the location to help,” Luis says.

Stable Offline Mode during Rare Network Emergencies

Network outages and internet issues have become much less of a concern after switching to Toast.

“Finding out that Toast had great offline capabilities and runs through our network—and not necessarily through wifi—was a big plus for us,” says Luis.

While Tacombi takes pride in maintaining their old-school, Mexican cuisine vibe, there’s no denying that it operates like a taqueria. With turn times as quick as 30 minutes and tacos coming out in just seven minutes, losing valuable time due to network failures was not up for debate. Toast’s offline mode provided them with network immunity—giving them the ability take payment and send orders to the kitchen in offline situations.

“We used to use credit card imprinters when the system went offline,” says Luis, “We’d take orders by hand and give the hand-written tickets directly to the kitchen. We were basically going back to prehistoric times. It was impossible to sustain given how fast-paced our operations are. With Toast’s full service offline mode, we don’t ever have to use the credit card imprinters,” says Luis.

Smooth, Consistent Training with Toast University

At Tacombi, efficiency and simplicity is essential to employee onboarding.

Luis explains, “My focus over the past couple of years has been to create an operation that can be replicated and standardized. With the growth we’re envisioning and opening three new stores before the end of the year, we want to be able to move managers from one location to another without having to train them. Toast has been an integral part of this focus on standardizing and simplifying.”

By using Toast University, Luis was able to see new employees become more productive, faster.

“Because our training approach has become completely streamlined, many of our team members can work at any location at any given time. For new store openings and new hires, we use Toast University for on-demand, interactive training to prepare employees with everything they need to hit the ground running. It only takes a new employee around one or two days to become familiar with Toast,” says Luis.

In addition to Toast’s reliable framework, speedy customer service, and highly accessible training material, Luis believes that there are many intricate features that contribute to their success with Toast.

“Each of these details all increase the speed of how quickly orders are put in, and reduce the margin of human error,” says Luis. “The service at Tacombi is super fast and that’s a testament to Toast.”