The Kendall Square Association put it clearly: "We are losing Kendall restaurants."
Home to MIT, the local offices of Google and Facebook and scores of biotechs, the storied innovation corridor of Kendall Square also houses nearly 30 restaurants — and they have been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. The Automatic shut its doors in May, and the Friendly Toast followed in June, opting to permanently close its Cambridge location, just to name two examples.
So in late spring, the Kendall Square Association (KSA) — which exists in part to help those restaurants attract business — began talking to local tech companies about what they could do to keep restaurants afloat. One of them was a startup that has a keen interest in the food industry's success: Toast.
Founded by MIT graduates, Toast has itself crumbled amid the pandemic. The restaurant platform provider cut its staff by half — more than 1,000 employees — in April and has been mostly quiet since then, announcing just two product releases, a flat-fee delivery service and a contactless payment suite. But in the background, Toast has been working closely with KSA to develop a new B2B service called Toast Drop.
As with its other products, in Toast Drop, the company essentially acts as a middleman. The service allows Kendall Square employers to order individually packaged, customized meals for their employees from local restaurants. Sponsored by Google Cambridge, Toast Drop does not charge fees to restaurants or to clients.
"Employees had this really basic, simple problem in that they weren't able to do traditional catering or have employees go out for lunch or open cafeterias," said Alana Olsen Westwater, KSA's vice president of strategy and operations. "On the flip side of things, in the Kendall community, the businesses that were being absolutely decimated were our small and local restaurants who were desperate to recreate some of the customer base they had lost... It was a confluence of realizations."
KSA and Toast had the first pilot of the program in place by early fall, and by mid-November, nearly 70% of local restaurants were participating, Olsen Westwater said. Companies including Draper and Synlogic have used Toast Drop for their own employees, many of whom are essential workers. (At Draper, biomedical scientists have worked with "organ-on-a-chip" technology to test an in vitro human lung model to investigate responses following infection with Covid-19 and influenza.)
Olsen Westwater believes the pilot program is a testament to Kendall Square's commitment to innovation, not just in world-changing technologies and medical research but also creating new solutions for small, old-school businesses. She expects it could be viable long-term as employers adapt their offices and business plans to new models, possibly nixing catering and cafeterias in favor of hybrid workweeks, or making other changes down the line.
"I really see this program being an important lifeline to restaurants as we try to navigate the near future and this winter, as we try to navigate our post-vaccine reality," Olsen Westwater said. "Post-Covid, this could be an important way employers rethink. Instead of doing the cafeteria system that has hurt so many areas with ground-floor retail, keeping employees inside buildings, this could bring business to small and local businesses as we reimagine our workplace of the future."
