How Indian Mound Saves Time by Streamlining Fuel, Grocery, and Deli Operations with Toast

The business has been in owner Sunni Nichols’ family for over 40 years starting with her stepfather, Jimmy Santangelo. After his passing, Sunni and her mother, Mikki, stepped in to keep things running. 

Five years later – with the help of long time manager, Amy, and their amazing team – they have the business figured out. But getting there meant confronting a set of systems that were never built to run a fuel, grocery, and deli business as one operation. That all changed when they brought on Toast in 2026.

Since then, Indian Mound has rolled out several upgrades for their employees and customers like unified payment for fuel and store items, digitized deli ordering, and self-service kiosks. Toast is helping Indian Mound run more efficiently so that Sunni and her team can focus on what they love most – engaging with their community.

Challenge

Bringing Fuel, Grocery, and Deli onto One System

Most of Indian Mound’s customers are regulars who live in the area. They show up to put gas in their tank and order deli food to go. Retirees come for coffee at 5 a.m. and can grab groceries on their way out. The local police officers and firefighters eat a meal for free when they're in uniform and on shift – a decades-old tradition started by Sunni’s stepfather, who served as a sheriff's captain and constable.

When Sunni and her mom jumped in to start running the business five years ago, they didn’t have any instructions on how to keep things running. Along the way they saw that their previous systems were working fine, but hadn’t kept pace with what their combined fuel-and-food operation needed.

Most customers coming to Indian Mound are making purchases across at least two areas of the store. With this degree of crossover, challenges began to compound:

• Fuel, store, meat processing, and deli purchasing ran on separate, disconnected systems.

• Deli orders were tracked on handwritten paper tickets that were hand-delivered to the kitchen.

• The legacy point-of-sale setup lacked modern functionality and was difficult for staff to use.

• Sunni had no practical way to track inventory or see what was actually selling.

“Our previous system was outdated and didn’t have all of the functionality that we needed. It wasn’t user-friendly, and I wanted to pull my hair out every time I had to use it,” says Sunni. For a two-person leadership team already teaching themselves the business from scratch, that kind of fragmentation wasn't sustainable.

Sunni was already interested in Toast to manage the convenience and deli side of the business. Once Toast's Fuel integration became a capability, she was sold.

Solution

Quicker Checkout, From Ten Steps to One

Indian Mound started running its pumps, store counter, and deli on Toast in July of 2026.

“Oftentimes people aren’t really fond of change, but we didn’t experience too much of that. The staff was really excited about the capabilities and were very eager to learn. Overall it was a really smooth transition to Toast because everyone was looking forward to the future and what we would be able to do now,” says Sunni.

Day to day, a unified platform makes it easier for team members to move customers between the deli, grocery, and gas checkout with less manual intervention. Toast can support all variations of the customer’s experience - whether they want to pay at the pump and go, or come inside to prepay and purchase other items.

When a customer places an order at the deli a team member submits it to a monitor in the kitchen. By the time the customer reaches the register, the cashier can pull that order straight into the same system used to ring up retail items and set a pump prepay – no paper ticket changes hands.

This connectivity makes it easier for the Indian Mound team to focus on catching up with regulars instead of piecing together different transactions. On top of that, the store has added Online Ordering, Gift Cards, and Toast Delivery Services, extending the deli beyond its own four walls and opening new potential revenue streams that didn’t exist before.

Taking the Guesswork Out of Inventory Management

Beyond the front of the house team, Sunni is now operating with greater visibility into the numbers behind the business. Toast provides a view of sales, costs, and margin across fuel, grocery, and deli – all in one place.

“We did not have any kind of inventory maintenance or upkeep before Toast, because with our old system it was basically impossible. I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s selling and what’s not because I didn’t have that clarity until now,” says Sunni.

She is also leaning on Toast IQ for quick answers to inform her daily decision-making.

Results

New Platform, Same Community Experience

Instead of continuing to operate like most blended fuel-grocery-deli businesses, stitching together multiple systems with separate support lines and reconciliation, Indian Mound uses Toast as the linchpin of its operations.

This can be seen across:

• Unified Toast POS & Fuel Payments: Fuel, grocery, and deli now run on one platform instead of several.

• Toast Fuel: Gives cashiers the ability to run fuel-specific transactions (prepayment by cash or card, Rest in Gas, and Move Prepay), see a real-time pump dashboard, and the ability to authorize or stop a pump.

• Deli Order Routing: Replaces handwritten tickets with digital order tracking from kitchen to register.

• Self-Order Kiosk, Online Ordering, Gift Cards, and Toast Delivery Services: All new ways for customers to order beyond the counter.

• Built-in reporting and AI insights: First-ever visibility into best sellers and inventory management.

The technology may have changed, but the reason people keep coming back has not. The church groups, retirees, and service members all still come for the community that Indian Mound has created. 

Sunni and her team have confidence that their POS and fuel partner are running in the background, ensuring that customers have a seamless visit every time.