How Eggs Up Grill is Building a Better Breakfast Brand and Growing Its Franchise Community with Toast

Building a Better Breakfast Brand

What does it take to grow a modern, full-service restaurant brand to more than 80 locations in the most important category of the day: breakfast? (Hint: it takes more than just great omelets and hot coffee.) 

Ask Ricky Richardson, CEO of Eggs Up Grill, and he’ll tell you that what sets the brand apart is “the friendliness and the positive emotional impact we make on guests through the quality of our food, the quality of our service, and the quality of the people and franchise partners that we have.” 

Since 2018, Eggs Up Grill has grown from 24 units to over 80 locations across nine states. In that time, AUVs, YoY location growth, and the number of franchise partners joining the Eggs Up Grill community have also increased. 

But great guest experiences, high-performing teams, successful franchisees, and a fast-growing business don’t happen by accident. So, what have Ricky and the Eggs Up Grill team done differently, and how has Toast helped?

Seeing the opportunity to spark growth

After a career in the restaurant industry and two decades in leadership roles at TGI Fridays, including as Chief Concept Officer, Ricky knows a thing or two about building enterprise restaurant brands. He saw a new challenge and a great opportunity in Eggs Up Grill. 

“As I learned more about Eggs Up Grill, it clearly had growth opportunities and strong support from our investors,” says Ricky. “But I also saw the need to work on the brand to further define what makes Eggs Up Grill special to our guests and to provide the tools and processes to franchise partners to help them grow topline sales and be highly profitable in their investments with us.” 

Ricky and his team knew that these new tools had to start with one core component: a modern, powerful point of sale (POS) platform. 

Bringing franchisees into the POS decision

Prior to 2018, Eggs Up Grill operated on two separate legacy POS systems installed across the brand. Ricky and his team knew that the brand needed a POS upgrade to a single platform and that the franchise community had to be part of the selection process from the very beginning.  

“We organized a group of six franchise partners and started looking at a number of different platforms,” Ricky says. “We brought two POS providers in and let our franchisees do order entry, test out reporting, and look at the hardware and economics. It was a unanimous decision to move forward with Toast.” 

One of those franchisees was Marc Cotone, who had invested in his first Eggs Up Grill after leaving the corporate accounting world and now owns multiple locations. “I joined the [franchise partner] POS Committee, and we ultimately landed on Toast,” Marc says. “What I loved most about Toast, and still do, is that when you buy into Toast, you’re not stuck with the system in its current state forever — the system is always evolving and improving.” 

While the endorsement from the franchisees who tested Toast was unanimous, Ricky and the Eggs Up Grill brand team knew they had to gain the trust of their full franchise community in order to ensure a successful POS transition. So, they gave existing franchisees a choice. 

“We didn’t require existing franchisees to convert to Toast, we just required it for all new restaurants,” Ricky recounts. “As of today, 22 of the 24 [original Eggs Up Grill franchisees at the time] have chosen on their own to convert to Toast because of the recommendations and endorsements they hear from existing franchisees.” 

Seamless onboarding and reduced training time

It’s one thing to choose a new POS partner; it’s another for that partner to help train your team and successfully take your locations live. Working closely with Eggs Up Grill’s brand team and franchise partners, Toast ensured the right onboarding and training resources were in place from the very beginning. 

“I attended Toast’s training program for free and got to learn the platform,” Marc says. “Toast being so tech-forward made it a pretty seamless transition for me.” 

With knowledge of the Toast platform under his belt, Marc found it easy to help train team members at his locations. “Most new team members are excited when they see that we run on Toast since other restaurants they’ve worked at likely used archaic, dinosaur-like systems,” Marc says. “Toast is intuitive and easy to learn, and our team generally is trained and ready to go a lot faster than at our competitors.”

Delivering breakfast service and front-of-house efficiency with Toast Go® 2 Handhelds

Full-service breakfast is a challenging daypart, with everything from early-morning regulars on their way to work to families on the go looking for friendly hospitality and, most importantly, a speedy turnaround. 

With the goal of enabling guests to have a great breakfast experience in 40 minutes or less (speedy for a full-service restaurant), the Eggs Up Grill team took a close look at every aspect of their front-of-house operations. One thing that stood out was the need for a world-class handheld POS like the Toast Go® 2. 

“There was no convincing needed that a handheld device was going to make the order entry process more accurate and more efficient,” Ricky says. “When you compliment that with the ability to pay at the table and do the transaction at the end of the experience through the handheld, it made it a no-brainer from my perspective, and the franchisees picked up on that really quickly as well.” 

The results were fewer trips back to the POS terminal for servers, greater order accuracy, and faster order firing to the kitchen. 

Decreasing average ticket times by up to two minutes with Toast KDS

A more efficient front of house doesn’t mean much if your kitchen can’t fulfill the additional orders. With franchisees implementing Toast Go® 2 handhelds, the Eggs Up Grill team knew it needed a back-of-house upgrade and implemented Toast’s Kitchen Display System (KDS) at a corporate-owned location. Pretty soon, franchise partners who saw the Toast KDS in action began requesting it for their own locations. 

“Initially, it was one franchise partner that had it, then another, then another,” Ricky says. “And that level of endorsement from franchise partners around efficiencies in the kitchen, the lack of mistakes coming out of the kitchen, fewer re-cooks because someone got something wrong or forgot something on a ticket was really positive.” 

For franchisees, implementing Toast KDS resulted in both improved operational performance and a positive influence on team morale. “The KDS has impacted ticket times and kitchen efficiency immensely,” says Marc. “I’ll never forget how demoralizing it can be to pull a roll of tickets off the printer as tall as me. The KDS has eliminated that ticket pain and helped to improve efficiency by having the order in front of our cooks in the blink of an eye. That level of efficiency is a huge win for us, physically and emotionally.” 

The results of implementing Toast KDS across the Eggs Up Grill footprint speak for themselves. “We’ve seen a 90-second to two-minute reduction in ticket times,” Ricky reports. “Ours are pretty quick anyway, but it’s the coordination, the reduction in mistakes, and the increase in order accuracy that makes the difference.” 

Better reporting, more control, happier franchisees

Like all great teams, successful franchised brands are built on strong communication and trust between corporate and franchise partners. As Toast rolled out across Eggs Up Grill locations, the team began to see how Toast’s advanced Restaurant Analytics provided brand team members and franchisees with a single, up-to-date view of the business. 

“The intuitive nature of Toast, the simplicity of the dashboard, even the menu management capabilities we have at the brand level, all of those things were attractive to me,” says Ricky. 

To help keep franchisees in the know and in control of their businesses, Toast brought the same type of powerful reporting and one-tap control over settings and permissions to the location level. “The fact that the entire point of sale is mobile with me, that I have the ability to fix a menu item, to fix a clock punch, or to check sales on the fly, that’s insanely powerful,” Marc says about the impact of Toast’s reporting capabilities and Toast Now mobile app on his day-to-day. 

Choosing an innovative partner for future growth

In spite of all this success, Eggs Up Grill isn’t sitting still and continues to innovate to drive future growth. The Eggs Up team expects its tech partners to think the same way. 

Following successful implementations of Toast Go® 2 and Toast KDS, Eggs Up Grill joined Toast’s Enterprise Customer Advisory Board and was an early tester of Toast Tables for waitlists and reservations. 

“Toast is by far the best POS out there and is constantly improving and expanding its capabilities,” Marc says about the innovation he’s seen as a franchise partner. “When choosing Toast, you get the software in its current state, but also the hundreds of features and improvements added annually. I’ve seen Toast in small mom-and-pops as well as in huge operations, and it’s a huge value-add for any business willing to give it a shot!” 

Learn more about how Toast helps enterprise brands grow at toasttab.com/enterprise.