Drive-thru

Design brief

Designing on the POS Orders team at Toast has been a uniquely rewarding challenge, especially given how ubiquitous our tablets and handhelds have become when dining out in the US. For the past three and half years, my team has worked to expand POS support to capture additional business types (ex. cafés, pizzerias, hotels, retail) and better serve existing customers.

Drive-thru was a major gap. There are roughly 175k drive-thrus in the US, and this project opened that market for Toast: unlocking large enterprise deals and finally giving smaller existing customers a system built for how they actually operate.

In five months, I led design across two teams, mentored a designer on the Drive-thru team, and brought a new POS drive-thru mode to GA.

Launching a new workflow

Some restaurants were already using Toast in their drive-thru, but it wasn't designed for this use case. The nearest fit workflow was for quick service restaurants - think coffee shops or ordering at a fast food counter. Customers at quick order restaurants order and pay in one interaction and then collect their order later. Although there are variations at a typical drive-thru customers order at a menu in the lane through a microphone, pay at a window, and then collect their order at a second window.

When the drive-thru is full swing staff count grows and specialize to maximize throughput. During low volume times a single staff member may juggle all three tasks (order, payment, handoff). It was a difficult task account for the operational flexibility within one store and variations from one store to another but I'm proud of the relatively simple solution that shipped. The resulting solution was a result of research with staff, operators and managers, and about a dozen quick prototypes exploring new workflows as well as leveraging patterns that were emergining simultaneously on the POS team.

Viewing orders on the POS

Toast customers running a drive-thru leveraged the existing POS list view for staff to manage orders in the drive-thru. This had several problems:

1. Operators didn't have an obvious sort order to use
2. Important statuses for drive-thru orders were not prominent
3. The existing payment filter tabs ("Open", "Paid", "Closed") awkwardly split a view of orders in the lane
4. The zigzag pattern of this list view didn't match a line of vehicles

Core workflow problem

The initial design push closed clear gaps from feature requests and examining competitor solutions. We needed a way for staff to easily correlate a vehicle with an order. And we needed an integration for the new digital menu boards from Delphi, a company that Toast had acquired a few years prior. These were solved with the vehicle identification form and a hardware integration between the POS and the menu board.

The team kept hearing from drive-thrus that "multi-tasking" was a main challenge. But it wasn't clear what this meant. Were staff covering multiple drive-thru lanes? Were they serving customers in-store while also helping in the drive-thru? It was clear that we needed more information, so I created a study with drive-thru workers. I interviewed workers from both enterprise and small business drive-thrus and used a mapping activity to understand visually how drive-thrus are staffed, the physical space and tools, and what challenges they faced.

Drive-thru workers are BUSY (I consistently heard that the drive-thru accounts for ~75% of a location's total orders) and a single slow order has a cascading effect on the rest of the lane. Drive-thru staff were dedicated to the only the drive-thru and POS equipment also was in physical spaces dedicated to the drive-thru - meaning drive-thru staff are not switching between serving the drive-thru and in-store customers. Often a portion of the kitchen was designed to only service the drive-thru. One suprising caveat was that some customers would pick up their online orders in the drive-thru lane, so I also desgined a workflow to insert online orders into the drive-thru queue. The main multi-tasking challenge was the asynchronous nature of the touchpoints of a single order. Since an order is interacted with at two or three different points in the lane, staff had to constantly switch between tasks and between the same orders leading to confusion.

Staff needed an easier way to multi-task between vehicles on the following four tasks:

1. Enter the guest order
2. Collect payment or acknowledge previous payment
3. Monitor order status in the kitchen
4. Hand off the order

Solution

I narrowed down to two different solutions to help staff manage the asynchronous nature of the drive-thru. One was a persistent queue panel showed the lane during ordering and payment. The other leveraged a full screen a single column list view based on a redesign I had completed for the Order Management team.

When I tested these solutions with drive-thru managers there was a majority preference for the full screen list view. The persistent queue panel while novel was seen as disrupting the ordering workflow by eating into the real estate of the menu and the full screen list view was also seen as clearer and easier to quickly see the order statuses. Managers that did prefer the persistent queue panel had simple single window operations that were single location restaurants. As Toast was targeting enterprise customers who are more likely to have more complex operations, the full screen list view was the clear choice.

Outcome

Drive-thru mode publically launched at the Restaurant Leadership Conference in April of 2026 and GA'ed on schedule in May. Adoption has been strong. During the beta period in February we had 16 restaurants placing 354 orders and the week before GA we had 87 restaurants placing 23,000 orders a week.

Drive-thru mode has been well received by operators and staff and has been seen as a major improvement in operations and training.

We operate a high-volume drive-thru, and historically Toast wasn't really designed with drive-thru workflows in mind... Team members even quit or refused to work drive-thru altogether... Drive-Thru Mode has been a huge improvement... It removes the guesswork, keeps the team aligned, and significantly reduces stress during peak times. From an operations and training standpoint, this feature has made the drive-thru much more manageable and efficient. We genuinely love this feature

With new hires, it's so much easier for them to just pick up the drive thru terminal and just work at it. That's the easiest thing. There's no training needed.