How Spirits Food & Friends Used Toast IQ Grow to Reduce Marketing Agency Spend by 71%

Lee seized the opportunity to leverage Toast’s all-in-one POS, payroll, scheduling, marketing, catering & events, and AI capabilities. Since switching, Spirits Food & Friends has been able to reduce costs, all while operating more efficiently.

Streamlining Restaurant Technology Operations

Prior to Toast, Spirits Food & Friends used a POS system that needed to be surrounded with a patchwork of additional tools just to run the business. Ultimately, Toast offered an opportunity to consolidate processes that had been running separately for years.

Efficient & Effective Marketing with Toast IQ Grow

Shortly after transitioning to Toast, Spirits Food & Friends became an early adopter of Toast IQ Grow – Toast’s AI marketing agent guided by dedicated human experts.

Historically, marketing was a moving target. An outside agency ran email, Google, and Meta ads for years, with vanity metrics such as views or opens as the only proof of efficacy. 

“We were using a shotgun approach – sending out messages and hoping that they reached the right people… That’s frustrating as a business owner, especially in a restaurant where margins are tight and we’re squeezing every bit of efficiency we can out of the business,” says Lee.

Since adopting Toast IQ Grow in September 2025, Spirits Food & Friends has been running targeted marketing campaigns based on the data and behavior of their customers – all of which already exists in Toast.

Top-Notch Marketing Drives Bottom-Line Growth

This data and automation provides an answer to the question that every marketing conversation eventually comes down to: is this generating sales?

The results are promising so far for Lee who has been able to:

• Reduce marketing agency spend by 71% ($1,500) each month*.

• Spend less time involved in marketing work, now just coming in for final approvals.

• See a direct connection between marketing and sales – with 24% of their overall sales attributed to marketing in just under a year*.

Streamlined Catering & Events Management

Beyond marketing, Lee points to catering and events as the area of the business with the most room to grow. Toast’s Catering & Events solution has helped to replace what used to be one-off quote creation in Word and manual tracking from inquiry to payment.

Lee is also eager for the next piece to land: a ticketing capability built into Toast Tables, currently in beta, that will let Spirits Food & Friends move its special-events ticket sales in-house as well, replacing another third-party platform in the process.

Saving Owner Time with Toast IQ

Marketing isn’t the only area where Lee has embedded Toast’s agentic capabilities into daily restaurant operations. He is also using Toast IQ – a native AI assistant – to turn back quick answers without going to support and automate daily reporting tasks.

“I get an email every morning where Toast IQ goes out and pulls the specific data that I want to see. It might be one of the most amazing things Toast offers, and I’ve only been using it for the last couple of weeks,” says Lee.

Between automation and quicker reporting, Lee estimates that he is saving anywhere from 2-3 hours each week using Toast IQ.

A Restaurant Platform that Grows With You

Over the last year Spirits Food & Friends has modernized some of its most critical processes and laid the foundation to keep growing.

Their team has been able to:

• Save on third-party marketing costs

• Confidently connect marketing campaigns to sales

• Scale a budding catering and events business more efficiently

• Spend less time on manual sales, marketing, and reporting-related tasks

For Lee, the value isn't just what any single tool does. It's having a platform that keeps expanding to help owners and operators better manage the busy-ness of their work.

“So often over the years, people have sold us a tool, onboarded us, and then left. It has not been like that with Toast. We've been supported every step of the way, and we see the commitment Toast has to our industry – to help make our lives better and grow at the same time. At the end of the day, we're in business to serve as many guests as we can and deliver a great product. The tools that back us up to do everything outside of that – that's what we look for, and Toast has delivered,” Lee says.

FAQs

How can restaurants use Toast to consolidate their technology stack? Customers like Spirits Food & Friends have used Toast as an all-in-one restaurant technology solution to consolidate their payroll, POS, marketing, inventory, and catering processes. This can allow them to better manage their data and save on third-party platform costs.

How does Toast help restaurants create more targeted marketing campaigns? Toast Marketing, Toast Advertising, and Toast IQ Grow are designed to build campaigns around a restaurant's own guest data — spending habits, dining preferences, and loyalty activity — rather than broad, untargeted outreach.

Can restaurants measure marketing ROI with Toast? Toast’s marketing tools and Toast IQ Grow are designed to connect marketing and advertising activity to real outcomes like orders and store visits, giving operators visibility they may not have had with outside agencies relying on engagement metrics alone.

What is Toast IQ? Toast IQ is Toast's native AI assistant. It helps operators troubleshoot issues, answer product questions, harness collective intelligence, and execute automated workflows.