Harri & Toast Team Up to Deliver a New Tech Solution To Address Rising Labor Costs in the Hospitality Industry

New York, NY (September 20, 2017): Harri, the end-to-end workforce operating system designed for the unique needs of the restaurant and hotel industry, today announced its partnership with Toast, the all-in-one restaurant management solution and one of the fastest growing SaaS companies in the US to provide a powerful, truly integrated solution for multi-unit restaurant groups that combines day-to-day operations management, end-to-end workforce management and CRM tools for enhanced visibility into business insights that drive bottom-line growth.

The Harri and Toast integration delivers critical data to restaurateurs to drive more informed decisions and increase efficiency by removing the data silos between staff and operational systems. Mutual customers, like Tacombi and Gregorys Coffee, both multi-unit operators, will be able to:

• Dive deep into employee performance | Utilize key performance metrics to measure employee success and areas for improvement. Build a 360 degree view of employee lifecycle from hire to on-the-job performance.
• Access a real-time dashboard with sales & labor data | Harri’s LiveWire dashboard provides an enterprise view of key sales and labor metrics for real-time monitoring. The dashboard also provides wage analysis, real-time labor cost tracking and time compliance alerts.

“As a restaurant owner for more than 18 years, I’ve long dreamt of the day I could combine two key, best-in-class systems, to manage all core aspects of my business. Our industry has been held back by fragmented systems, bad data and clunky technology for too long. Today, our partnership with the incredible team at Toast heralds a new era of capability that will help our mutual clients navigate the challenging times ahead,” Luke Fryer, founder and CEO of Harri.

Rising minimum wage rates are a huge financial challenge facing the industries served by Harri and Toast. Among 3.5-star restaurants, every $1 increase in the minimum wage increases the restaurant’s chances of closing by 14 percent.¹

“According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics April 2017 report, two-thirds of workers earning the minimum wage or less in 2016 were employed in service jobs, predominantly in the food industry. By 2018, minimum wage in many states will rise from as low as $7.25 an hour to reach between $11.00 and $15.00 an hour for hospitality workers. These wage increases will positively impact employees, but will also require restaurants to get creative and really focus on efficiency," said Aman Narang, president and co-founder of Toast. "We look forward to partnering with Harri to enable restaurants to be as streamlined as possible. They are a key member of Toast’s best-in-class partner ecosystem, the Toast API Partner Program, which empowers Toast users to improve overall operations and grow revenue.

Toast Restaurant POS offers advanced functionality to manage the day-to-day operations of the restaurant, including quick menu modifications, real-time enterprise reporting and labor management on an easy-to-use interface. The platform also features revenue-driving tools including physical and digital gift cards, loyalty programs and online ordering.

¹ Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit

ABOUT HARRI

Harri is a Workforce Operating System built specifically for the challenges of the hospitality industry. Helping restaurants and hotels source, hire, and manage their employees more effectively and efficiently is more critical than ever before. Harri’s all-in-one digital platform, employers can find and onboard top talent for their business using media-rich profiles and streamlined tools, all while reducing costs, saving time, and enabling long-term success of teams with best-in-class cloud-based management systems.

To date, more than 3,000,000 applications from chefs, bartenders, servers, hostesses, and managers have been submitted to 53,000 jobs posted on Harri.

Harri has more than 370,000 members and 8,000 employers spanning the US and UK markets. It is the number one marketplace for hospitality talent in NYC.

For more information, visit harri.com.

About Toast

Founded by Steve Fredette, Aman Narang and Jonathan Grimm, Toast is a restaurant technology platform that enables customers to simplify and streamline all elements of their operation and deliver a better guest experience. Toast offers a mobile, cloud-based point of sale system (POS) that easily integrates with front-of-house, back-of-house, online ordering, gift card and loyalty programs, as well as labor and sales reporting. Since launching in 2013, the company has grown to over 500 employees. In 2017, Toast was named one of the world’s hottest cloud computing companies in the Forbes Cloud 100 and it announced raising over $100 million as part of its Series C financing. Learn more at www.toasttab.com.