How San Fernando Coffee Co. Makes Rapid Growth Repeatable – Cutting Store Opening Time by 65% and Sharpening Marketing ROI with Toast

The company has cut new-store openings from about three months in the past to 31 days for the most recent store opening. As part of its broader growth strategy, it has also built Toast IQ Grow into its marketing engine as it expands to new markets.

Challenge

Partnering with a POS that Scales

Founder and CEO Isaiah Rosario spent a decade in high-end kitchens when a fateful opportunity came his way. A landlord offered him a struggling 247-square-foot trolley car space with discounted rent. He took the leap with his partner, Lorena Nuñez, and together they've been building San Fernando Coffee Company ever since.

Early on they opted for Square, but as the business grew,  their needs evolved, and Isaiah decided to explore other POS options. He prioritized:

• Ease of scaling and replicating as new stores opened

• An integrated branded website and a mobile app

• Strong multi-location reporting and insights

Solution

A Playbook for Opening New Stores Quickly

Isaiah runs the company's growth like a system, not a series of one-off launches – and Toast is a core part of how each new location gets duplicated. One phone call sets the menu, tax rate, and back-office configuration for a new store, rather than a fresh setup each time.

“Toast plays a big role in our ability to grow quickly. Everything is very copy and paste, and everything is connected. Things like our POS, payroll, and tax handling are set up in one go, and I don’t have to worry about it,” says Isaiah.

Behind the scenes, DAVO's integration with Toast handles sales tax automatically across every location – which Isaiah describes as “life-changing” – making one less manual process for a small back-office team to worry about.

Over the last few years, that consistency has helped shrink the timeline for new store launches.

Data-Driven Marketing with Toast IQ Grow

As San Fernando Coffee Co. expands to new cities in California and beyond, effective and targeted marketing becomes more important than ever.

“Our biggest marketing challenge is that we’re still a small team. There are a lot of different roles we all have to play, and trying to identify the gaps and fill them is difficult,” said Lorena. Working with a third-party marketing agency provided more resourcing, but there was limited visibility into the impact of this work on real sales.

Isaiah and Lorena enlisted Toast IQ Grow – Toast’s AI marketing agent backed by a dedicated marketing expert. “Toast IQ Grow helps us fill a lot of the gaps in areas we just don’t have the manpower to focus on – ads, promotions, and data analysis,” says Lorena.

Day to day, that's meant:

• Running geo-targeted promotions for specific underperforming locations, rather than one blanket campaign across all 20 stores.

• Offloading design and copy production for SMS and email campaigns to Toast.

• A dedicated marketing success manager who brings campaign ideas to the table based on data and customer trends.

• Consistent, always-on messaging that keeps the brand's voice intact across a growing footprint.

• The ability to directly connect marketing work and sales – with one recent email campaign generating 1,400 orders and $24,000 in marketing-attributed sales*. 

The data behind those campaigns has also surfaced patterns the team hadn't acted on before — like a predictable afternoon lull.

“Our slow times are usually between 2:00 to 6:00pm. With the SMS and email messages from Toast IQ Grow, we’ve seen people come back during those times and that reflects back in our sales,” says Lorena.

Another element to driving strong brand awareness and positive sentiment is through customer reviews. A recent addition to the Toast IQ Grow suite includes a Reviews Agent, which allows operators to solicit and respond to Google Reviews more quickly within Toast. 

“The Reviews Agent helps us manage our Google reviews more effectively by keeping everything in one platform and utilizing AI-generated responses… It helps us respond to reviews more quickly and efficiently,” says Isaiah.

Results

As San Fernando Coffee Co. keeps momentum in doubling their footprint this year, the essence of the business remains the same. “I think everyone deserves a good cup of coffee, and they shouldn’t have to drive a long way to get it,” says Isaiah.

“We are excited to expand into new communities, and now our job is to control the consistency and make sure we’re serving a great product,” he adds.

Today, San Fernando Coffee Co. has a strong POS partner to support them in this next phase of their business:

• Toast POS, Payroll, Capital, and DAVO Integration: Consolidates back-office setup to make new store openings faster and smoother.

• Toast IQ Grow: Runs always-on targeted marketing campaigns, with 42% of sales attributed to marketing over a twenty-two day period since launching**.