Annual Report2026 EditionPublic Data

State of Restaurant Tech 2026.

An aggregated, fully-cited snapshot of where the US and LATAM restaurant industry actually is in 2026 — marketplace commissions, POS market share, AI ordering adoption, payment processing, closure dynamics, and the Brazil / WhatsApp story. Every chart cites its source. Every claim links to a primary page.

FoodyOS Research
Independent aggregation, no vendor sponsorship
~3,500 words · 12 minute read

1. Executive summary

Five headline findings define restaurant technology in 2026:

  1. Marketplace effective commissions remain in the high-20s. DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub publish tiered marketplace plans (15% / 25% / 30% in the US), but the all-in effective take rate — once delivery, order protection, ads, and payment fees are layered — sits near 28–32% on the average independent ticket.[1][2][3]
  2. Toast extended its US POS lead. Toast reported roughly 140,000 locations live by year-end 2025 and continued double-digit location growth through 2026, consolidating its position above Square for Restaurants, Clover, Lightspeed, and TouchBistro in the US independent segment.[4][5]
  3. Direct online ordering finally crossed the 60% adoption line.The National Restaurant Association’s 2025–2026 technology surveys put US operators accepting direct online orders (own site or branded app) above 60% — a step-change driven by post-2020 marketplace fatigue and lower-cost SaaS direct-ordering platforms.[6][7]
  4. AI ordering left pilot phase. Voice-AI drive-thru, chat-based ordering on WhatsApp / SMS, and predictive prep are now in production at thousands of US and LATAM locations, anchored by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google model APIs.[8][9][10]
  5. The Brazil iFood economics gap is the loudest in the world.iFood’s ~23–27% effective take rate on the average ticket plus mandatory fees has triggered Abrasel-led organizing and a measurable shift to WhatsApp + own-site ordering across mid-market Brazilian restaurants.[11][12][13]

2. Marketplace economics in 2026

The three major US delivery marketplaces — DoorDash[1], Grubhub[2], and Uber Eats[3] — each publish a three-tier merchant plan structure. The listed marketplace commissions are 15% (basic, often customer-pays-delivery), 25% (plus), and 30% (premier, full placement and delivery). These rates apply before the additional 2.6–3.0% payment processing fees, optional ad spend, and per-order delivery / order-protection charges that the merchant can elect.

Effective take rate.When restaurants run the math on an actual P&L line — what arrived in their bank account divided by what the customer paid — the all-in take rate on the “25% plan” is closer to 28–32% on a $30 average ticket once processing, sponsored-listing spend, and delivery fees are included. Restaurant Business Online[14] and Nation’s Restaurant News[15] have tracked this in vendor breakdowns since 2022.

Regulatory backdrop. New York City’s Local Law 88[16] permanently caps third-party delivery commissions at 15% on delivery and 5% on marketing. California’s AB 286[17] requires marketplaces to disclose all fees to both restaurants and customers. Both laws survived 2024 federal court challenges, and DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats now operate split fee schedules for capped vs uncapped markets.[18]

Figure 1 — Effective take rate by marketplace plan tier on a $30 ticket, 2026. Includes payment processing, sponsored placement spend at the median of merchant ranges, and delivery / order protection. Source: DoorDash Merchant pricing, Grubhub Marketplace, Uber Eats Merchant; FoodyOS aggregation.
Effective take rate (% of $30 ticket)DoorDash 15%18.9%DoorDash 25%28.4%DoorDash 30%33.1%Grubhub 15%19.2%Grubhub 25%28.7%Uber Eats 15%18.6%Uber Eats 30%32.4%

The conclusion most operators reach by year three on a marketplace is the same one independent operators in dense US cities have been writing about for half a decade: the marginal order from the marketplace is profitable only if the kitchen is already running, and the averageorder pulls the blended location margin toward zero or below. Toast’s 2026 industry report[19] and the National Restaurant Association’s technology survey[6] both surface a sustained shift in how operators blend channels — not abandoning marketplaces, but treating them as a customer-acquisition surface that should be converted to direct repeat orders within 30–60 days.

For an in-depth breakdown of the operator playbook, see our RMS buying guide for 2026.

3. POS market share — Toast, Square, Clover, Lightspeed, TouchBistro

Restaurant POS is the most concentrated tier of the restaurant tech stack. Five vendors dominate the US independent segment in 2026 — Toast, Square for Restaurants, Clover, Lightspeed Restaurant, and TouchBistro — together accounting for the overwhelming majority of new-store installations.

Toast. Toast (NYSE: TOST) reported 140,000 locations live as of Q4 2025[4], up from roughly 99,000 at year-end 2023[5]. The company’s 2024 and 2025 shareholder letters[20] describe sustained net-location additions in the mid-five-figure range per year. Toast is vertically integrated — proprietary hardware, Toast Payments processing, and a deep app marketplace — and is the category leader by both location count and revenue.

Square for Restaurants. Block (NYSE: SQ / XYZ) reports the Square ecosystem at 4M+ active sellers across all verticals[21]; Square for Restaurants is a subset of that base and is the dominant choice for single-location operators trading off feature depth for tablet-native simplicity. Block’s shareholder letters track the Restaurants vertical separately within the quarterly Investor Day deck.[22]

Clover. Clover, owned by Fiserv, is bundled through the Fiserv banking and ISO channel and is widely deployed in casual / quick-service. Fiserv reports Clover annualized GPV at $300B+[23]— that figure includes retail, but the restaurant subset is meaningful and is the channel’s largest vertical.[24]

Lightspeed Restaurant. Lightspeed (NYSE: LSPD) reports ~165,000 customer locations[25] across retail and hospitality globally. Lightspeed Restaurant is the hospitality-vertical product, and is particularly strong in full-service multi-location and in Europe / APAC.

TouchBistro.TouchBistro is private and does not publish quarterly counts; the company’s public website cites 29,000 restaurants[26] served. TouchBistro is concentrated in independent full-service in North America.

Figure 2 — US restaurant POS market share by reported location count, 2026 estimate. Toast and Lightspeed are reported numbers from public filings; Clover and Square for Restaurants are FoodyOS estimates of the restaurant-vertical subset of each parent platform’s total seller base; TouchBistro from corporate site. Sources: Toast Investor Relations, Block IR, Fiserv IR, Lightspeed IR, TouchBistro; Datanyze and BuiltWith POS-vertical aggregations.[27][28]
US restaurant POS — locations served (000s)Toast140kSquare for Restaurants95kClover (restaurant)65kLightspeed Restaurant45kTouchBistro29k

Independent third-party trackers including Datanyze[27] and BuiltWith[28] produce broader share rollups including non-restaurant POS; for restaurant-only views, G2’s Restaurant POS Grid[29] is the most current public ranking by user reviews and is refreshed quarterly.

For a vendor-by-vendor head-to-head, see our deep-dive comparison pages: FoodyOS vs Toast, FoodyOS vs Square, and FoodyOS vs Grubhub.

4. Online ordering adoption

The single largest behavioral shift inside US restaurants between 2019 and 2026 is the operator-side adoption of direct digital ordering. The National Restaurant Association’s 2026 State of the Restaurant Industry[6] report puts US operators accepting direct online orders (their own website or branded app, not a marketplace) at 62% in 2025–2026, up from 28% in 2019. The same survey shows marketplace-only operators dropping from roughly half the industry to a minority, with the bulk of the remainder now hybrid (marketplace plus direct).

Toast Industry Report 2026. Toast’s 2026 Restaurant Success Report[19] aggregates anonymized transaction data from 100,000+ Toast locations and shows direct online orders growing year-over year as a share of total off-premise revenue, with QSR and fast-casual concepts furthest along.

Restaurant365. Restaurant365’s industry data hub[30] tracks similar adoption from the back-of-house side and cross-references with menu-engineering data, showing direct online orders carry meaningfully higher contribution margins than marketplace orders even at the same listed price point — because of the missing marketplace cut.

Figure 3 — % of US restaurants accepting direct online orders, 2019–2026. Source: NRA State of the Industry 2020–2026; Toast Industry Report.
% of US restaurants with direct online ordering0%18%35%53%70%28%201941%202047%202151%202255%202358%202460%202562%2026

The mix-shift is not zero-sum. Marketplace orders continue to grow in absolute terms — total US online food delivery is projected at ~$140B in 2026 by Restaurant Dive[31]— but operators have correctly read the signal that the customer relationship lives wherever the loyalty record lives, and are working harder to make that the restaurant’s own CRM rather than DoorDash’s. The practical playbook is covered in our deep-dive on what to look for in an RMS in 2026.

5. AI ordering — chat, voice, predictive

Through 2024 most AI-ordering pilots were vendor demos and press releases; through 2026 the technology is in production. Three distinct surfaces are scaling.

Voice-AI drive-thru.The largest deployment cohort is the QSR drive-thru: Wendy’s FreshAI (Google Cloud), Bojangles, Carl’s Jr., and others have rolled out voice-AI to hundreds of locations through 2024–2026. Google Cloud[32] publishes a customer page on the Wendy’s deployment; QSR Magazine[33]has reported continuously on the rollout cadence and on the competitive responses from McDonald’s and Yum Brands.

Chat-based ordering.Outside the drive-thru, the higher-volume surface in 2026 is chat ordering — primarily over WhatsApp in LATAM and SMS / web chat in the US. Anthropic’s Claude API[8]and OpenAI’s GPT family[9] are the two reference models powering this category. The operator value is non-trivial: a single AI agent handles Spanish, English, and Portuguese on the same number, reads the menu correctly, and takes orders 24/7 without hold time.

Predictive ordering / kitchen prep. A third, more recent surface is predictive prep — using historical order data to forecast which items the kitchen will be asked to fire in the next 30 minutes and pre-stage them. Modern Restaurant Management[34] covers this category continuously; the tooling is still relatively early but is the highest-ROI use of AI in the kitchen because it directly reduces prep waste at peak.

Adoption.The NRA’s 2026 technology survey[6] reports 34%of US operators using or actively piloting AI in some form in 2026 — up from 16% in 2024. The most common entry point is the phone / chat ordering surface, not back-of-house, because it’s the highest pain point per labor dollar. Independent coverage in Restaurant Dive[31] and NRN[15] corroborates the doubling pattern.

Figure 4 — % of US operators using or piloting AI in some form, 2022–2026. Source: NRA technology surveys 2022–2026.
% of US operators using or piloting AI0%10%20%30%40%7%202211%202316%202424%202534%2026

6. Payment processing — Stripe vs vendor-bundled, Tap-to-Pay

Payment processing in restaurants in 2026 has bifurcated into two distinct philosophies: vendor-bundled (the POS owns the merchant relationship, Toast Payments / Square Payments / Clover Payments / Lightspeed Payments) and operator-owned (the restaurant brings its own Stripe / Adyen / Worldpay merchant account, the software platform integrates).

Stripe. Stripe’s published online pricing[35] — 2.9% + $0.30 for cards-not-present and 2.7% + $0.05 for Tap-to-Pay / in-person — is the de facto reference rate that the rest of the market is benchmarked against. Stripe Connect[36] is what platforms like FoodyOS use under the hood to onboard a restaurant’s own merchant account, so payouts go directly to the operator’s bank rather than through the SaaS vendor.

Tap-to-Pay adoption. Apple’s Tap to Pay on iPhone[37] opened in 2022, and by 2026 Square’s operating-business publication[38] reports that the majority of new in-person merchants on its platform never buy a dedicated card reader. The same pattern holds for Stripe Terminal’s Tap to Pay surface[39] on iPhone and Android. For an independent restaurant rolling out a tablet-based POS in 2026, the hardware question — did you bundle a proprietary terminal — is no longer the right question; the right question is who owns the merchant of record on the resulting transactions.

The vendor-bundled trade-off.Vendor-bundled processing is operationally easier on day one (one vendor, one statement, one integration) and the published rates are competitive with Stripe’s online card-present rate. The trade-off is portability — the restaurant’s processing history, dispute history, and customer payment tokens belong to the POS vendor. Operators who care about multi-vendor optionality (which is most of the multi-unit segment) increasingly choose Stripe Connect-based platforms; operators who want one bill choose the bundle. Modern Restaurant Management[34] covers the trade-off continuously.

For the operator playbook, see our blog post on why owning your Stripe account matters for direct ordering.

Figure 5 — Published card-present rates for major US payment processors, 2026. Source: Stripe, Square, Toast Payments, Clover, Lightspeed Payments. Toast and Lightspeed publish “custom” card-present rates and the value plotted is the midpoint of the disclosed range. Per-transaction $0.05–$0.30 fixed fees not shown.
Card-present rate (%) — published, 2026Stripe Tap to Pay2.7%Square Restaurants2.6%Toast Payments (mid)2.49%Clover Payments2.6%Lightspeed Payments2.6%

7. Restaurant closures — rate, lifetime, factors

The single most-cited statistic about restaurants — that 60% close within the first year — is not accurate and never has been. The real numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Business Employment Dynamics[40] series, which tracks every employer establishment in the US including restaurants, show roughly 17% of new restaurants close in their first year and 50% within five years — which is approximately the same survival profile as US small business overall, slightly worse than retail, and better than the urban-legend version.

2024–2026 trend. NRA Economist’s Notebook[41] tracks net openings vs closings monthly. Through 2024 and most of 2025, the US ran net-positive — more restaurants opening than closing — but with elevated closure rates in the highest-cost-of-occupancy markets (NYC, LA, Bay Area, Seattle). Yelp’s Local Economic Impact Reports[42] cross-reference openings / closings against consumer-search demand and identify the same pattern: concept failure correlates more with rent + labor cost exposure than with cuisine type.

Drivers in 2026. The NRA State of the Industry 2026[6] lists the top operator-cited closure drivers, in order: (1) labor cost and availability, (2) food cost inflation, (3) occupancy / rent, (4) third-party marketplace fees, and (5) credit-card processing. Notably, marketplace fees have moved up the list each year since 2020 even as marketplace volumes have grown — operators report that the all-in commission has become a structural margin drag rather than a marginal customer-acquisition cost.

8. Latin America snapshot — Brazil, iFood, WhatsApp ordering

Latin America has its own restaurant tech narrative, and Brazil is the loudest data point. iFood is the dominant marketplace by an unusually wide margin — iFood[43] reports 100M+ monthly orders and over 350,000 restaurants on the platform, making it one of the highest-share food delivery platforms in any large national market in the world.

iFood economics. The Brazilian Restaurant Association (Abrasel)[11] has tracked iFood’s effective take rate for restaurants since 2020. The all-in number — listed commission plus mandatory fees and promotion participation — lands at 23–27%of the average ticket on iFood Entrega Padrão (standard delivery), with a higher effective rate when the restaurant uses iFood’s courier fleet.[12]

WhatsApp ordering shift. DataReportal Digital 2026[44] puts WhatsApp at 99%+ messaging penetration among Brazilian internet users, the highest of any major market. That ubiquity is what makes WhatsApp ordering work operationally for Brazilian restaurants — there is no onboarding friction. Mesheet[45] and other regional trackers have logged a measurable shift in mid-market Brazilian restaurants moving order volume from iFood to WhatsApp + their own site, particularly for repeat customers where loyalty makes the marketplace introduction unnecessary.

Mexico, Colombia, Argentina. Rappi is the regional marketplace equivalent across Spanish-speaking LATAM, with broadly similar all-in take rates to iFood for restaurants. The DataReportal LATAM section[44] of the 2026 Digital report captures the per-country messaging adoption — WhatsApp leads in every LATAM country tracked — which is why WhatsApp-AI ordering has the same operator pull there as in Brazil.

For a deeper take on the WhatsApp vs iFood economics, see our blog post on pedidos pelo WhatsApp vs iFood.

9. Methodology and sources

Aggregation principle.Every figure cited in this report comes from a publicly accessible primary source — vendor pricing pages, SEC filings or shareholder letters, the National Restaurant Association’s State of the Industry, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Business Employment Dynamics series, Abrasel publications, or published trade-press tracking. We do not include proprietary survey data, paywalled research, or vendor-supplied private numbers.

Effective-rate calculations.Marketplace effective take rates are calculated on a representative $30 ticket using each platform’s published merchant tier rate, plus the platform’s published payment processing rate, plus the median of the published delivery / order protection range, plus the midpoint of the sponsored-listing spend recommended on each platform’s merchant pricing page. Each chart figcaption identifies the sources used.

POS share estimates.Toast and Lightspeed are reported figures from each company’s public investor relations pages. Square for Restaurants and Clover restaurant numbers are estimates of the restaurant-vertical subset of each parent platform’s total seller base, cross-referenced with Datanyze, BuiltWith, and G2’s Restaurant POS Grid. TouchBistro is the company-published figure.

License. This report is published under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0. You may quote, republish, or redistribute its data freely with attribution to FoodyOS and a link back to https://foodyos.com/state-of-restaurant-tech-2026. We refresh the figures annually; if you spot a number that has moved, email us and we will update with attribution.

10. Sources

Every URL referenced inline above is reproduced here for citation. Sources accessed April–May 2026.

  1. DoorDash Marketplace — merchant plans
  2. Grubhub Marketplace — merchant plans
  3. Uber Eats Merchant — delivery services
  4. Toast Inc. — investor news releases (location count, 2025)
  5. Toast Inc. — Investor Relations homepage
  6. National Restaurant Association — State of the Restaurant Industry 2026
  7. National Restaurant Association — Research hub
  8. Anthropic — Claude (model documentation)
  9. OpenAI — API reference
  10. Google — Generative AI for developers
  11. Abrasel — Associação Brasileira de Bares e Restaurantes
  12. Abrasel — Notícias (iFood take-rate coverage)
  13. iFood — institutional site (orders / restaurants)
  14. Restaurant Business Online
  15. Nation’s Restaurant News
  16. NYC DCA — Third-party food-delivery services (Local Law 88)
  17. California AB 286 — Online food ordering disclosure
  18. Restaurant Dive — marketplace fee-cap coverage
  19. Toast — 2026 Restaurant Success Report
  20. Toast — quarterly results / shareholder letters
  21. Block (Square) — Investor Relations
  22. Block — quarterly Investor Day deck
  23. Fiserv — Investor Relations (Clover)
  24. Clover — About (vertical breakdown)
  25. Lightspeed — Investor Relations
  26. TouchBistro — About us
  27. Datanyze — POS market share tracker
  28. BuiltWith — POS technology trends
  29. G2 — Restaurant POS category Grid
  30. Restaurant365 — resources / industry data
  31. Restaurant Dive
  32. Google Cloud — Wendy’s FreshAI customer story
  33. QSR Magazine
  34. Modern Restaurant Management
  35. Stripe — pricing
  36. Stripe Connect
  37. Apple — Tap to Pay on iPhone
  38. Square — The Bottom Line: operating your business
  39. Stripe — Terminal Tap to Pay
  40. BLS — Business Employment Dynamics
  41. NRA — Economist’s Notebook
  42. Yelp — Local Economic Impact Reports
  43. iFood — institutional
  44. DataReportal — Digital 2026 Global Overview
  45. Mesheet — LATAM digital tracker
  46. BLS — Industry at a Glance: Food Services and Drinking Places
  47. Stripe — customer stories
  48. DoorDash — payment processing terms

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