How Teapulse Scaled to 10 Locations and is Becoming a Franchise-Ready Brand with Toast

As Teapulse expanded from its first location in Flushing, NY into new neighborhoods, its customer base broadened—and so did its needs. For co-founder, CFO, and CMO Alvin Zhang, that growth introduced new requirements for a POS, including multilingual support and a more intuitive experience for both employees and guests.

Challenge

Outgrowing a POS Built for a Different Market

In a few short years Teapulse cycled through several POS partners. With each transition, Alvin and the team encountered hurdles such as:

• A platform designed for a different market, with limited depth in U.S. payment processing and integrations.

• Third-party delivery orders routed through a middleman integration, creating delays and incomplete two-way syncing.

• Limited support for English-speaking team members, which was critical for a growing multi-lingual brand.

As their footprint grew, those small frictions started to add up, prompting the search for a new platform.

In Spring 2026 Teapulse made the strategic decision to shift to Toast, which was successfully rolled out to all of their stores by September.

Solution

Multi-Lingual Support & Onboarding with Toast

With locations situated across different New York City neighborhoods, the preferred language for team members can differ from place to place. Having a dedicated multi-lingual onboarding and account team at Toast was an important factor for Teapulse’s diverse team.

The rollout itself unfolded store by store rather than all at once, which gave the team time to get comfortable with the new system before adding the next location.

Toast's on-the-ground support helped keep things on track: equipment arrived days ahead of each go-live, and a team came on-site the night before to handle installation, setup, and configuration.

A Smooth Customer Experience from Payment to Delivery

As they grow, Teapulse aims to offer a consistent experience for customers from the moment they pay to the moment the drink is in their hand. Alvin has noticed that a familiar checkout process matters as Teapulse reaches a broader customer base.

"Payment is a tricky thing; you want it to feel comfortable, because you're exchanging money. New Yorkers are so used to a system like Toast – it's everywhere – so it gives them that consistent and trusted experience,” he says.

Getting the right order to customers every time also hinges on reliable communication between Toast and a fully automated bubble tea machine. 

Getting there took real diligence: with dozens of possible sugar-and-ice combinations, Toast's team tested as many as 400 modifier scenarios before go-live, to confirm the machine would read every order correctly from day one.

That same smoothness extends beyond the counter. Teapulse's mainstream delivery orders – through Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub – connect to Toast as direct integrations, so an adjustment or refund flows back into the system just as easily as the original order did.

Accessing Insights with Toast IQ in Any Language

Teapulse's day-to-day operations run in English – the POS, the customer-facing menu, the kiosk – with Chinese product names added alongside the English ones for stores in neighborhoods like Chinatown and Flushing. But behind the scenes, some of Teapulse's corporate team members are more comfortable working in Mandarin.

Store managers use Toast IQ to quickly surface reports and data – like a quick table of GMV, discounts, and net sales for a specific date range, for example – without digging through reporting.

Results

The Future of Teapulse in NYC and Beyond

With ten locations live on Toast, Teapulse's switch touched several parts of the business at once:

• Toast POS: Offers a user-friendly and recognized UI for employees and customers alike.

• Toast Multi-Location Menu Management: Lets Teapulse set location-specific pricing for new stores without rebuilding menus from scratch.

• Toast’s Multi-Lingual Onboarding & Support: Guided Teapulse from first demo through go-live across all locations.

• Toast IQ: Makes it easier for team members to pull reports and insights in their preferred language.

• Ease of Integration: Both with third-party delivery services and their bubble tea machine, which are critical for day-to-day operations.