Birmingham-founded startup WineView is kicking off the new year with a major partnership.
The company is partnering with Toast, a multibillion-dollar company and one of the largest players in the POS system space.
Toast selected WineView to provide its integration for wine. Toast currently has upwards of 65,000 restaurant customers, and WineView will be available on the Toast platform Jan. 10.
WineView helps restaurant servers provide wine recommendations to customers. It uses machine-learning logic that can capture and pair more than 400,000 wines with more than 250,000 recipes.
It aims to help restaurants avoid leaving money on the table when it comes to wine by providing new and inexperienced restaurant workers who entered the workforce during the pandemic, as well as experienced ones, with this knowledge.
"For Birmingham, I think it's really exciting. ... There are tons of restaurants here that use Toast," Gary Campbell, CEO of WineView, said of the partnership. "Bettola, Helen, Chris Hastings' restaurants, Hot and Hot. The Fennec is one of our customers and The Battery. So for the Birmingham market, specifically, I think they will start to see us rolling out into some more local restaurants with this integration."
Campbell makes his mission clear.
“WineView isn’t going to just add another tech solution for restaurants," he said. "Our goal is to 'change the script' and put wine in every conversation. Using WineView, servers will be able to recommend wine to every guest, every time. ... This partnership with Toast makes that possible and provides that seamless experience.
“At the end of the day, you don’t have to be a white tablecloth restaurant to provide exceptional table-side wine service. Even some of the newer restaurants that have opted not to use servers at all can use WineView to manage their wine programs and delight their guests.”
And after securing this major partnership, WineView is looking to continue expanding its footprint.
WineView currently has offices in Atlanta, Dallas, Nashville, Birmingham and Pensacola, with plans to add Boston, Chicago and Washington, D.C., in the near future.
"For the growth of the company, last year was all about stability," Campbell said. "We put together four things: our product; our people; the places, our markets that we want to roll it out in; and finally, the most key part is the partner, which is Toast, and to have a multibillion-dollar partner is critical in this space, to have somebody to integrate with. So I think we're gonna see some massive growth this year."
The startup is also a Birmingham Bound company, and it moved its headquarters to the Magic City in 2021.
