Toast Launches New Tool to Track Real-Time Menu Price Monitor and Trends Across U.S. Restaurants

Toast, the leading all-in-one digital platform for restaurants, has introduced the Menu Price Monitor – a powerful new tool delivering monthly insights into menu pricing trends across the United States.

Drawing from data across more than 140,000 restaurant locations on the Toast platform (as of March 31, 2025), the Menu Price Monitor provides a clear, data-backed view of how menu prices are shifting over time. It focuses on key food and beverage items – including burgers, fries, soft drinks, coffee, and popular combo meals – and presents pricing data at the median, 25th percentile, and 75th percentile, along with year-over-year percentage changes.

Built on Toast Benchmarking and powered by AI-driven menu categorization, this tool uses AI-driven classification to accurately categorize menu items and deliver reliable, actionable insights. With this launch, Toast equips industry stakeholders with a no-nonsense view of real-time intelligence for pricing dynamics, helping them stay informed and make smarter decisions.

Key Takeaways

• With data aggregated from over 140,000 restaurant locations, the tool helps operators track month-over-month and year-over-year price movements for common menu items like coffee, beer, burgers, and chicken wings. This allows businesses to spot pricing shifts and adjust accordingly.
• At the core of the tool is Toast Benchmarking, an AI system that standardizes menu items into consistent categories, ensuring comparability across regions.
• The Menu Price Monitor supports smarter pricing decisions by providing percentile-based benchmarks. Operators can assess how their prices compare to peers, react to inflation pressures, evaluate promotions, or explore alternative sourcing to protect profit margins.
• The insights are valuable not just for restaurants, but also for suppliers, lenders, landlords, and policymakers. The tool can indicate demand shifts, cost pressures, and regional affordability, making it a useful resource across the food and hospitality ecosystem.

Toast Launches Menu Price Monitor to Help Restaurants Track Pricing Trends and Make Smarter Decisions

The restaurant sector has faced considerable pricing pressures in recent years, driven by rising costs of ingredients, labor, and overhead. Operators often struggle to determine when and how to adjust menu prices without losing customer loyalty or competitive positioning. Recognizing this challenge, Toast has developed the Menu Price Monitor to provide data-driven guidance on pricing strategies.

Using the aggregated anonymized information from thousands of locations, the new tool will give restaurateurs a clearer understanding of industry-wide trends, enabling more informed decision-making.

Toast is a cloud-based platform that supports restaurant operations across point of sale, payments, digital ordering, and team management. As of March 31, 2025, Toast’s network includes over 140,000 restaurant locations in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. Leveraging this extensive customer base, Toast’s Menu Price Monitor tracks pricing changes for key food and beverage categories.

The tracker focuses on staple food items like regular coffee, cold brew coffee, beer, burgers, burritos, and chicken wings. For each item, it reports median prices as well as the 25th and 75th percentile values, along with year-over-year percentage changes.

At the core of the Menu Price Monitor is Toast Benchmarking, an AI-based classification system that standardizes menu items into consistent categories. This process ensures that a “burger” sold in Boston can be compared to a “burger” sold in Los Angeles, even if the exact name or toppings vary between operators.

Each month, data from all applicable Toast platform locations is aggregated to produce a snapshot of current pricing. Historical data extend back two years, allowing users to observe both seasonality and longer-term trends. It presents pricing data at the median and percentile levels, which highlights the distribution of prices, showing where most restaurants price items and where outliers may exist.

Steve Fredette, Co-founder and President of Toast, stated that Toast’s large network of restaurants gives them a strong advantage in delivering meaningful insights and building data-driven tools like Toast Benchmarking. He noted that with features such as the new Menu Price Monitor and Restaurant Trends Reports, they aim to highlight changes in menu pricing and evolving consumer habits. According to him, these resources offer a valuable look into current industry conditions, and they plan to continue sharing this data each month to support decision-making across the restaurant sector.

Toast is in the process of further enhancing the capabilities of the Menu Price Monitor through the planned addition of several new menu categories and more granular levels of segmentation. In the upcoming phases, there is potential inclusion of price tracking for various segments such as appetizers, dessert items, non-alcoholic specialty beverages, as well as shareable dishes. There is also consideration being given to a more detailed classification based on restaurant format—whether it be quick-service, fast casual, or full-service establishments—thereby offering operators a more contextual benchmarking framework for performance evaluation relative to similar peers.

In addition to this, geographic filtering is being looked into, whereby users may soon be able to observe and compare pricing trends across different states or metro regions. Such a highly detailed and localized perspective could assist operators who are entering unfamiliar territories in aligning their launch pricing with region-specific expectations and consumer behaviour patterns.

Toast is simultaneously exploring possibilities for tighter integration between insights generated from the Menu Price Monitor and real-time POS system data. Looking ahead, it is conceivable that restaurant operators could receive automatic notifications in instances where their menu pricing diverges noticeably from the median benchmarks.

Using both historical trend analysis and present-day sales performance, the system may eventually facilitate more responsive pricing strategies, such as time-bound offers or dynamic rate adjustments, based on observed shifts in consumer demand. For instance, in the event of a nationwide upward movement in beer pricing, a bar could be prompted to schedule a craft beer offer during low-footfall hours in order to sustain throughput while also maintaining control over inventory-related costs.

Snapshot of April 2025 Data

The initial public release of Menu Price Monitor data reflects pricing levels for April 2025. Key figures include:

• Regular Coffee: Median price of $3.50, marking a 6.4% increase compared to April 2024 and flat relative to March 2025.
• Cold Brew Coffee: Median price of $5.40, up 4.2% year-over-year and unchanged from March 2025.
• Beer: Median price of $6.41, reflecting a 2.6% rise compared to April 2024 and a 0.2% uptick from March 2025.
• Burgers: Median price of $14.31, up 3.1% from April 2024 and 0.3% higher than March 2025.
• Burritos: Median price of $13.32, showing a 3.3% year-over-year increase and a 0.5% rise month-over-month.
• Chicken Wings: Median price of $13.67, up 3.2% year-over-year and roughly unchanged (+0.01%) from March 2025.

As you can see, menu prices for core items have continued to rise over the past year, though growth has slowed or plateaued for certain categories when compared to the prior month. For example, burger and burrito prices have increased marginally since March 2025, indicating that operators may be holding pricing steady to maintain customer traffic levels

Tracking menu prices on a monthly basis provides restaurateurs with a more granular perspective than annual benchmarking alone. Seasonal factors – such as tourism fluctuations in summer or holiday-driven demand in winter – often affect menu pricing. Historical data show that coffee prices tend to spike during fall and winter months, while cold brew may experience faster growth during warmer periods. When we compare both year-over-year and month-over-month trends, we can identify abnormal price movements that may signal supply chain disruptions, shifts in consumer preferences, or competitive pressures.

Not only this, but inflationary pressures on food costs have remained elevated in 2024 and early 2025. The Federal Reserve’s measures to control inflation have indirectly influenced restaurant expenses, as ingredient suppliers pass on higher costs. Monthly visibility into pricing adjustments allows restaurants to respond more promptly – either by adjusting menu prices, modifying portion sizes, or exploring alternative suppliers. Historical percentile data also highlight how price ranges have widened; for instance, the gap between the 25th and 75th percentiles for a burger may signal increased variation in quality offerings or location-based cost differences.

Benefits to the Restaurant Operators

Having access to a standardized dataset covering 140,000 locations offers multiple advantages to restaurant operators:

• Competitive Benchmarking: Operators can compare their pricing to the market median and identify whether they are underpricing or overpricing specific items. This comparison helps establish optimal price points that balance profitability with customer perception.
• Supply Chain Strategy: If menu prices for a category rise faster than general inflation, it may indicate cost pressures on key ingredients. Restaurants can use this insight to renegotiate supplier contracts, consider seasonal menus, or adjust portion sizes to maintain margins.
• Promotional Planning: When median prices of coffee or cold brew begin to stagnate, operators might promote alternative beverages or bundle deals to boost average ticket size. Conversely, if beer prices spike, restaurants could introduce promotions like happy hour discounts to attract foot traffic.
• Menu Engineering: Menu engineers can fine-tune item placement, portion sizes, and price points by observing percentile trends. If a restaurant’s burger price sits at the 75th percentile without generating corresponding sales volume, management may need to revisit burger recipes or reposition them as premium offerings.
• Investor and Franchise Insights: For multi-unit operators or investors evaluating franchise opportunities, having a snapshot of pricing norms in each region aids in financial modeling and return projections. Historical data can also highlight emerging markets where price increases outpace the national average.

Role of AI and Data Analytics

Toast Benchmarking uses an AI-based classification system to maintain uniformity in category definitions across many different menus. This method helps to clear the confusion caused by item names or regional menu differences; for example, both “dry-aged burger” and “smash burger” are grouped under one common burger category. The AI model carefully analyzes transaction-level data like item descriptions, order codes, and modifiers to place each sale into the correct category. This classification step is very important because it allows the correct aggregation of millions of data points every month.

The AI model also changes and improves over time. When new menu items come into the market, such as plant-based protein burgers or nitro coffee drinks, the classification algorithm is retrained to properly categorize these new items. Continuous learning keeps the Menu Price Monitor updated, capturing new trends even when menus change. This ongoing categorization reduces the need for manual work and lowers the chance of errors in classification, giving restaurateurs confidence in the accuracy of the percentile calculations.

How Aggregated Pricing Data Supports Broader Industry and Policy Decisions

Beyond helping individual operators, aggregated pricing data can inform supply chain stakeholders, financial analysts, and policymakers. For instance:

• Ingredient Suppliers: A sustained rise in median chicken wing prices may signal that poultry supplies are tightening or feed costs are increasing. Suppliers can use this information to forecast demand, adjust production schedules, or explore alternative protein sources.
• Financial Institutions: Banks and lenders assessing restaurant credit risk can reference industry-wide pricing trends to gauge margin pressures. If pricing for high-margin items like coffee and cold brew remains stable while lower-margin categories (e.g., burgers) see steeper increases, lenders may infer that operators are prioritizing demand-driven offerings over cost-recovery strategies.
• Commercial Real Estate Owners: Landlords leasing to QSR (quick-service restaurant) tenants can track pricing trends to understand average check sizes. Higher check sizes for burritos and burgers may correlate with increased foot traffic and ancillary retail spending, informing lease negotiations or expansion plans.
• Policy Makers and Researchers: Economists studying the impact of inflation on consumer spending can incorporate the Menu Price Monitor data as a proxy for dining-out costs. Since the dataset covers diverse geographies, it enables regional comparisons and can highlight food affordability issues in high-cost markets like New York or San Francisco.

About Toast

Toast, Inc. is an American cloud-based restaurant management software company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 2012 by Steve Fredette, Aman Narang, and Jonathan Grimm, Toast offers an all-in-one point of sale (POS) and management platform built on the Android operating system, designed to streamline restaurant operations from order management and payment processing to kitchen display systems and staff management. The company’s integrated suite includes hardware such as terminals, handheld devices, and self-ordering kiosks, alongside software solutions for online ordering, loyalty programs, and inventory management, enabling restaurants to improve efficiency, increase revenue, and enhance the guest experience.

Since its inception, Toast has grown rapidly, serving approximately 120,000 U.S. restaurant locations and employing around 5,700 people as of 2024. In September 2021, the company went public on the NYSE under the ticker TOST, raising $870 million and achieving a market capitalization of nearly $20 billion at IPO. Toast’s platform now supports restaurants across the United States as well as in Ireland, India, and other international markets, processing billions in annual payment volume. Through strategic acquisitions, such as Delphi Display Systems in early 2023, and product expansions like the launch of reservation support in April 2023, Toast continues to broaden its offerings and solidify its position as a leading technology provider for the global restaurant industry.

Conclusion

The launch of Toast’s Menu Price Monitor marks a timely step forward for the restaurant industry, offering reliable data and monthly insights that help businesses better understand and respond to changing price dynamics. Backed by a wide network of over 140,000 restaurant locations and powered by AI-driven categorization, the tool provides practical benchmarks for pricing decisions, cost management, and menu planning.

With the ability to compare across markets and food categories, it equips operators, suppliers, and other stakeholders with actionable intelligence to navigate inflationary pressures, shifting consumer preferences, and regional cost differences. As restaurants continue to face economic uncertainty, tools like the Menu Price Monitor can play a meaningful role in supporting smarter, faster, and more confident decision-making across the board.