Internationalization @ Toast: Toast’s Journey 

Welcome to the inaugural post in our Toast Technology Internationalization (i18n) blog series, where we'll be delving into the exciting journey of Toast’s internationalization efforts. Toast started as a product tailored specifically for the US market to address the needs of United States based restaurants. This series will walk you through our journey of expanding our software globally, from the internationalization of various areas of the product, localization to different markets and to providing the ability to accept payments in international markets.

The Beginning of Toast’s Journey

Toast began its journey as a software platform designed to meet the needs of restaurants across the United States. Our mission was to simplify and enhance the restaurant experience through innovative technology. Initially, our focus was on addressing the unique demands of the US market, but as our platform gained popularity, we saw a tremendous opportunity to broaden our horizons.

Our first international foray started with a couple of restaurants in Ireland. It was a significant milestone for us, and it opened our eyes to the potential of bringing Toast to restaurants around the world. From Ireland, our presence grew to include restaurants in Canada, and the UK. Each new market brought its own set of challenges and learnings, driving us to refine and enhance our approach to internationalization. 

Why Go Global?

At Toast, our mission has always been customer-focused: empowering restaurants and their guests to have the best experience possible. As an all-in-one platform built for restaurants, we’re passionate about enriching the food experience for all. Toast connects employees, operations, and guests on a reliable, easy-to-use platform, helping restaurateurs stay ahead in a fast-changing hospitality market. From the front of house to the back of house, and from dine-in to takeout, Toast brings it all together on a cloud-based POS and payments system.

We’ve built this platform with a deep understanding of the restaurant industry and a relentless drive to innovate for its unique needs. While we've succeeded in transforming the restaurant experience across the United States, we recognize that the food experience knows no borders. Our goal is to bring the same seamless, connected experience we’ve delivered to U.S. restaurateurs to diverse regions and languages, enabling employees, operators, and guests in other regions to benefit from a platform designed with their specific needs in mind. 

Geographic expansion offers the chance to serve a wider range of customers, from bustling urban eateries to charming rural cafes. It also presents an opportunity to learn from different culinary cultures and bring those insights back to improve our product for all users. Furthermore, by embracing international markets, we hope to better support the growing diversity within the US itself, where many communities speak languages other than English.

^{Source: Toast Investor day, May 2024 TAM - Total Addressable Market} The Foundations of Internationalization

To kick off this series, let's explore some of the foundational steps we took in starting to internationalize the product. For our engineering teams, aligning on standard data formats was essential to ensure consistency and compatibility across different regions. Here are some of the key standards we adopted:

ISO 3166-2 for Country Codes: ISO 3166 is a standard for country codes and codes for their subdivisions. By using this standard, we ensure that our system can accurately identify and process data related to different countries, enabling seamless integration and operation across borders.

For example,

United States is identified by the country code "US," 

Canada is "CA," 

and Ireland is "IE."

Aligning on the standard formats allowed us to have consistency across our systems when dealing with country information. This is key when dealing with restaurant location information, delivery addresses and country specific information and having a single format to identify a country is foundational to our internationalization. 

ISO 4217 for Currency Codes: Handling multiple currencies is a fundamental requirement for international operations. ISO 4217 provides standard currency codes, allowing us to manage transactions in various currencies without confusion or errors. This standardization is crucial for maintaining the integrity of financial data across different markets.

For example, 

When dealing with United States dollars, the currency code is USD

When dealing with Euros, the currency code is EUR

When dealing with Canadian Dollars, the currency code is CAD

By leveraging the standard identifier for currency, we can now leverage different frameworks available to developers around displaying currency such as Symbols ($/€/, long and short identifiers(US$ vs $) and number of decimal places for sub units. 

E.164 for Phone Numbers: E.164 is an international standard for phone number formatting. By adhering to this standard, we build our system to correctly interpret and store phone numbers from any country, facilitating effective communication with our global customers. 

Toast originally was focused on supporting numbers from US customers and relied on validating phone numbers to the North American Numbering Plan (NANP). When we operate internationally, phone numbers get much more complex in nature - this is also true when supporting international numbers from within the US. 

For example, 

A phone number in the United States would be (555)-555-5555, however in an international context, we would need to add the international dialing prefix here if this phone number needs to be accessible from a non NANP country. E164 gives us the flexibility to represent the number in an international ready format. The resulting number using the e164 standard is +16172971005. This standardization is still a work in progress at Toast.  We have a number of systems still supporting local numbers only as we’re working on bringing the support across our systems. 

Future blog posts will go deeper on the challenges and intricacies of supporting international formats and how we started the journey to add support of international phone numbers to Toast products. 

IANA Timezone Identifiers: Accurate timekeeping is vital for any business, especially in the restaurant industry where reservations, orders, and deliveries must be precisely timed. IANA timezone identifiers allow us to handle time-related data accurately across different regions, ensuring that our services are reliable no matter where they are used.

For example, 

A restaurant operating in Dublin, Ireland would use the timezone identifier of Europe/Dublin while a restaurant operating in Los Angeles would use America/Los_Angeles. It's important to have these at the restaurant level rather than the country level as some states / countries may have multiple supported timezones. By standardizing the ID of the timezone, we can determine  the UTC offsets between restaurants and correctly apply Daylight savings when it's in effect.

Locale Identifiers (BCP 47): To provide a truly localized experience, it’s essential to understand the language and cultural context of each market. BCP 47 locale identifiers help us describe language preferences for different countries, enabling us to tailor our user interfaces, notifications, and documentation to meet the specific needs of our international users.

It gets important when looking at how best to present information to customers in a specific market. For example, when looking at Spanish, there are dialect differences between countries and to correctly identify these we would need an identifier that can identify both the language and the country that it is used in. 

In areas like Quebec in Canada which are french speaking, we would use the locale tag fr-CA to define the locale for that region. The language being ‘fr’ and the country it's used in being Canada. For French speakers in the US, we would use the locale ‘fr-US’. Being able to correctly provide locales that are tailored to the customers’ market is key for our localization mission

A simple example of how locales affect how users consume data can be seen below.

Looking Ahead

This is just the beginning of our journey into internationalization. In the upcoming posts in this series, we'll dive deeper into the various aspects of this process. We’ll share insights into the tools and technologies we are leveraging to make Toast a more versatile and multi-region accessible platform, and explore the intricacies of localizing the Toast product to cater to different languages and cultural nuances, as well as handling addresses in various international contexts. We'll discuss the importance of translating not just words, but the entire user experience, to create a product that feels native to each market we serve.

Thank you for joining us on this exciting journey; we’re thrilled to share our experiences and learnings with you as we continue to grow and expand Toast’s reach.

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