Designing Toast’s Digital Storefront Platform

Restaurants don’t think in products — they think in brand. As Toast expanded its digital offerings, I led the transformation of three standalone tools into a unified Digital Storefront Platform, creating a shared system for identity, structure, and flow.

screenshot of digital products

Role

Lead Designer

team

Product, Research, Engineering

Scope

End-to-end product & platform design

Problem Area

Restaurants were juggling multiple tools to manage a single brand.

That meant extra work, with the same menus, hours, promos, and photos entered in multiple places. Brand details drifted across web, online ordering, and the mobile app, leading to inconsistent experiences for guests. Updates were slow and risky, forcing teams to guess how changes would appear live — and mistakes often slipped through. As restaurants grew, every new location or channel multiplied the busywork.


The opportunity was to unify the digital storefront into a single editor and source of truth, so operators could make a change once and trust it everywhere.

Before: Online Ordering configuration, Website builder and App editor

after: digital storefront brand editor

Design roadmap

A Platform Strategy for a Unified Storefront

This strategy reframed the Digital Storefront from three independent products into a unified editing architecture built on shared identity, modular structure, and predictable flow.

screenshot of digital products

Design Principles

Three pillars guiding how we build consistent, scalable restaurant experiences.

Identity

01

Brand First, everywhere

Define the restaurant’s identity once, and carry it everywhere.

  • One shared Brand Kit across Website, Ordering, and App
  • Brand updates reflected consistently across surfaces
  • Fewer surface-specific overrides

Structure

02

Shared building blocks

Create reusable modules that power every surface.

  • Modular layouts adaptable per surface
  • Content and structure separated from presentation
  • Faster launches and easier expansion across the suite.

flow

03

Predictable Propagation

Make it clear what updates everywhere — and what stays local.

  • Defined inheritance rules across products
  • Unified draft > preview > publish flow
  • Transparent sync and override states

A Dedicated Design System for the Digital Storefront Editor

To support a unified editing experience, we created a dedicated design system purpose-built for the Digital Storefront Editor. This system was developed independently from Toast’s core design system to meet the unique needs of complex content editing, real-time previews, and multi-channel publishing.It provided a consistent foundation for layout, components, and interaction patterns while remaining flexible enough to support future growth. By establishing shared rules and building blocks early, we enabled faster iteration, clearer collaboration with engineering, and a more cohesive experience across the entire storefront.