Good afternoon, everyone, or good morning, rather. My name is Chuck Nabhan. I cover the payments and fintech space here at Stephens. Thrilled to be joined today by Savneet Singh, who is the CEO of PAR Technology. Over the past several years, PAR has transformed from a hardware-centric business into a unified cloud-native platform that powers enterprise restaurants and convenience operators worldwide, connecting front-of-the-house, loyalty, back office, and payments. Again, Savneet, really appreciate you joining us this year. Just starting with the big picture, over six years, you've taken PAR from a legacy hardware vendor to a true software SaaS platform. If we step back, how would you describe what PAR is today and what makes the business unique in the enterprise space?
I think PAR today is the platform to run your enterprise restaurant. We sort of look at ourselves as providing the front to back, meaning front being engagement solutions, online ordering, loyalty, and then the back being POS and back office. The idea and the vision, honestly, since we kind of took over the business, has been to build more of a platform approach to restaurant technology than a piecemeal, best-of-breed solution that the industry had gone on. The idea was always that restaurants are not tech businesses, and they shouldn't be asked to be. The idea of working with 20 vendors to create some magical experiences is just never going to work. We have worked really hard to build or acquire best-in-class products, integrate them deeply, and give our customers a better outcome.
I think our growth is really representative of actually the industry actually moving to our thesis, which is, yeah, we can't have 25 different vendors in each store. We need to kind of integrate this so that we can actually be innovative and be responsive. I kind of look at us as kind of an end-to-end platform to run your enterprise restaurant.
Yeah. Why is the unification of technology an advantage in a category that's historically been fragmented?
There's a lot of answers to that. I think maybe first is just simplicity. One of the great challenges in the restaurant space is when there's a problem with your technology, you can't figure out whose fault it is. If you type your card, it doesn't work. The payment company points to the POS company, the POS company points to the payment company, and somebody points somewhere else, as opposed to one vendor, and it really simplifies that for your operators or your franchisees. I think the second one, and the one that is most important, is that I think you can be more innovative with a platform than you can with a bunch of point solutions.
One of our sort of product theses at PAR is best in class and better together, meaning our products on their own need to be the best at what they do. When they're bought together, they need to create better together outcomes, meaning they can do something that you couldn't do before. That's really been kind of the big unlock or the key for PAR has been proving that thesis forward. What does that mean? It means that when our customers buy two products from us, we are literally removing a product that they have to manage, update, and they can do something from that. The way I try to explain it to investors is imagine you're in your Microsoft shop, and you've got Outlook and Calendar as two sePARate applications.
Every time you want to send out an invite, you type in someone's name, and their email's not showing up, and you're like, "Oh, crap. That's on my mail client. I got to go copy it there and move that to the calendar thing." It's that clunky is what we're dealing with today. Again, creating that simplicity also allows you to be more innovative because then you can, in that example, send more invites or do mail merges or whatever you're thinking of doing. I think it actually creates the ability to be. I think in a world where AI first, it's going to be almost impossible to corral the data in a way that you can actually leverage AI when it's in six different places and not saying the same thing, not in the same schema.
I think in an AI world, it really, really begs the question of, ironically, making it simpler so that we can do these cool, innovative solutions.
If we dig into the product category, starting with Operator Cloud, you've said 2025 will be the strongest bookings year in your history. What's driving that momentum? Maybe if you could talk about the balance between the macro, Teppert, same store sales and uncertainty from a business standpoint and the benefits of newer technology adoption and how that's helped your customers navigate some of those challenges.
Yeah. Maybe I'll do the second part first. I think the macro climate for restaurants has not been good in 2025, particularly in the QSR category, which is unique because generally, QSRs do really well when people are nervous about their incomes. There are lots of different reasons for that. One of the things that we realize is that when things are slow, not when they're falling off the cliff, but when things are slow, it actually accelerates our business. We're hopeful this is our best bookings year ever. I think that's been partly driven by the fact that when your sales are lower, you're trying to find ways to engage your guests. You want to invest more in loyalty because those loyal users become even more important in a down market.
You're trying to have more digital solutions so people can access your food in an easier fashion or faster fashion. A lot of that is dependent on having better POS, better Back Office so you can then put all these cool tooling on top. We've found it to result in actually a really good sales year for us. Now, we won't see the impact of those sales until '26 and '27, but I think they're very much tied together. In short, I think the macro, it slows us down into a year. It slows down rollouts because franchisees will say, "Hey, I want to wait another month or two months," whatever it is. In the long run, it's actually, ironically, a good thing because it pulls more into the pipeline faster than probably it would on its own.
Continuing with that pipeline theme, you've noted the POS deals are becoming more multi-product. What products are you seeing the highest level of cross-sell? Additionally, why are operators taking more? Is it the sales force focusing more on cross-sell or a function of demand or products resonating in the market?
I think there's a couple of things. We certainly have seen way more cross-sell this year than ever before. 70% of our deals we talked about the last couple of quarters have been multi-product. The average customer at PAR is now at 1.9 or two products. When you go back two years, the number was zero, basically zero. We hadn't figured out this cross-sell. I think what's unlocked is that when you truly integrate the products and the customer can have one pane of glass to do two products into one, the cross-sell kind of happens itself. It becomes like a great long. We have an online ordering product, and there's a big legacy incumbent that's got great market share, very stable product.
Ours is the more modern cool kind of block, still building lots of functionality, but really at a point where it can be disruptive. When we go to our loyalty customers and say, "Hey, why don't you look at our online ordering?" they're wowed by how modern and cool it looks. What really impresses them is like, "Oh my gosh, the back end is like one back end for both systems." I can update my menu from my loyalty and my online ordering, my DoorDash and Uber Eats all from one place on one button. It's like, "Yeah." I can import my POS menu with a button as opposed to two or three weeks of people manually pulling stuff out of the POS and putting it in there. That integration that ends up has been really, really core to the cross-sell.
In the last two quarters, 70% of our loyalty deals include online ordering. That's really been a cool thing to see. The other part, I think, is the macro. I think that it's kind of what we talked about in the past, which is when we made a decision to stick with PAR and build it, our contrarian idea was that, A, restaurants were being eaten by software, and they didn't quite appreciate it yet. The second part of the thesis was that the platform idea was going to win, not a single product.
I think that's now becoming consensus, which is I think everyone realizes the idea of having an online ordering vendor here, a POS vendor here, a loyalty vendor here, a supply chain vendor here, whatever it is, like having dozens of dozens of vendors, that you become a vendor manager as a CIO and not an experience creator. I think they realize that. What I think is helping us is now that we have enough customers that have multiple products, they see the value that gets spread to other folks who kind of in a kind of compounds and compounds and compounds. Honestly, I think it's the products actually living to the promises that we've been talking about that drives it. We are horrible at marketing, but we really do believe product wins in the end in the enterprise.
I wanted to touch on a couple of underlying themes in the industry, the first being the shift from on-prem to the cloud within the QSR space, the second being moving from a preferred vendor list to getting everyone on the same platform, which is the case with the Burger King deal that you announced a couple of years ago. Could you talk a little about those themes and how PAR has been able to capitalize?
Yeah. On the last one, every deal we do is an exclusive and essentially a mandate. That's a really big theme because 10 years ago, it was, "Here are three approved vendors. Pick whoever you want." Now, because of the cloud, you don't want to have multiple point of sale systems because you're going to have one loyalty program across all your stores. If you had multiple point of sale systems and you're kind of maintaining integration to one POS here, one POS here, one POS here, that's like a lot of risk to your operations. The move to a singular vendor has been there for a long time. I take no credit for that happened, honestly, before I got there. I literally think we have one customer that's not exclusive to us.
Everyone else is very much they have to pick us there. The move to the cloud, I think, has been restaurants, retail are probably the last categories of large business to adopt to the cloud or move to the cloud. In many ways, they did not need to. I mean, honestly, before the pandemic, there were a few brands that had really invested in digital, went all out to kind of win that war, but you did not really need to. We kind of forget before the pandemic, we never went to we did not download the apps of our favorite fast foods or fast casual places. That was not a thing. I do not think McDonald's had loyalties till 2021.
We forget that our only food delivery was Uber Eats and DoorDash, and it still wasn't as big as it was, but it was like, "Okay, there wasn't a thing." I think that the move to the cloud got mandated when digital became, "Oh my gosh, it's like e-commerce. Once it's out of the box, it's just not going to stop." I think our customers realize once you go down that snowball becoming a digital business, it doesn't stop for a long time. The cloud just became something we have to get to. I think those that haven't got there are really struggling because it's prevented them from having the best mobile experience, the best digital experience online, the best e-commerce experience online, the best loyalty experience. They've been really limited in that. You can see that in their stocks.
You can see that in their performance. You can see that from the commentary from their CEOs. The brands that made the investment have had better results. I think everyone is getting there. It's just about when do you want to rip that Band-Aid.
Aside from the benefits of a more simple integration, could you talk about the benefits of unified data and how having everybody on the same POS not just enables loyalty, but also facilitates greater knowledge and potentially usage of AI in terms of getting to know your customers and understanding trends?
The issue with restaurants specifically has always it's never been data. There's always been plenty of data. It's about accessing the data, getting use out of that data. For a long time, we used to sell this idea of, "We're going to put your data in one place because we have multiple products, and then you can get used to it." The challenge has always been the schema on the loyalty system is different than the POS or different than the ordering system. We spent a lot of time trying to match stuff together. Everyone in the restaurant space would say the POS was a system of records. It's a system of truth. I just pulled from the POS, and I don't look at anyone else's data. That's a shame because that data elsewhere is actually quite valuable.
You've had literally businesses built and consultants built on trying to just match all your data together for you. We used to sell this idea that at PAR, we should get to one database, one menu service that powers everything, so you don't need to go through this. I think the way we look at it today is that it's entirely an AI pitch, meaning it is really, really hard to envision a world where AI actually enters restaurant technology unless there is a unified data provider. I always joke, "Whose agent are you going to use? The POS agent, the online ordering agent? How's that going to work? Who's going to push that menu to ChatGPT, or who's going to push that order from ChatGPT to the store?" A lot of this stuff is so complicated.
I think that what we have realized is that our core value is going to be unifying the building AI in the workflow of our customer, meaning you do not need to go add another product, learn that product, and then put that stuff back into your core product. It is already built there. Just like I suspect most of us outside of ChatGPT, the products we use the most are built into our Microsoft Outlook or our Teams or whatever, the workflows we use today or Salesforce or ServiceNow. It is already built in there. We are really trying to make that happen. That only really works if the data is clean and consistent across all your products. That is kind of now our new big push.
Got it. I wanted to touch on competition. You have some legacy incumbents, some newer entrants that are working up market, as well as your ancillary solution providers that are out there as well. Could you talk about what you're seeing in the market, whether you're seeing an increased vigor in terms of pricing competition, if you're seeing any changes in the quality of the technology that you're going up against in the RFPs? Any details around there, I think, would be helpful.
The competitive set hasn't changed in a long time. Our biggest competition is always incumbency. Incumbency has great power, although I think it gets smaller and smaller as incumbency is oftentimes the reason why you as a customer haven't been innovative yet. We have our core, the incumbents that own massive market share, Oracle, NCR, Global Payments through Zenio, and a few others. Those are core. They're solid products. They're stable products. They've been there a long time. They've all had some form of, "Now we're a cloud product. Don't look here. Look there." Those haven't worked super well yet. I think the power there is incumbency, not yet a product that you can get behind. We'll see if those evolve over time and can pull that forward.
The other bucket of competitors that you kind of referenced, we've always had Toast and Toast has been the mix in almost every RFP for many, many years. We've had Square come in and out. We've had some startups come in and out. I think it really hasn't changed that much. I think for us, the core has been, if we build the best product, the moat will continue to get deeper. As we build integrations between our core products together, that better together thing becomes a huge moat. It's very, very hard to compete with that. I think the competitive set hasn't changed that much. I think what has changed is that the enterprises are moving more rapidly to modern products. You're seeing more deals get won at larger and larger scales.
It's interesting to think that today what we think is a large deal or a small deal was a large deal just four or five years ago. We used to think getting a $2 million annual recurring revenue POS deal was a pretty big deal for us. Today, that's a small deal. That's what's changed. The market has really changed where these deals are much larger. The bigger brands are more willing to move than they've ever been before. As it relates to the peers, I think they've all got Toast is an incredible product, truly, truly incredible what they do down market. I think it's still got ways to go up market. Honestly, I just wonder if it's really worth their time.
I always say if Toast won every deal we want and had a big Loyalty product and a Back Office product, they would add our market cap to theirs. Over seven years, it's probably not the best return on time. I think the other startups, they'll win deals here and there, but it's very hard to get scale. I think on the incumbents, their big weapon is incumbency and price. That's where we'll always have to combat with, "Here's the product value we give you.
Yep. I want to pivot to Task, which is your international platform. First, you made a tough call to delay some rollouts and prioritize building for global tier one RFPs. How do you balance those short-term trade-offs with the long-term opportunity of serving global brands?
Not well. Not well meaning you got to do this right for the business, but it's not fun to call a customer and say, "We're going to push you out. We love you so much, but you're less important than this other big opportunity." That is not a fun conversation. That is why I said we don't do it well, but I think we make the right decision. In the end, if we're successful in winning a big RFP, we would make this decision 10 out of 10 times. I think that's kind of the lens we look for, which is we think we've got a decent shot. Not just the revenue opportunity, but just what it does to our company is so transformational that we wouldn't want to be stupid about trying to be Pennywise Pound Foolish.
Our culture is deeply kind of outcome-based and focus-based. It's like, "Can we potentially make it happen? Yeah, we could juggle this, juggle that, juggle that. If we're going to put risk on the really big win, why do that?" We have kind of made that decision. Thankfully, those brands and customers have been patient and said, "Okay, we'll go." I think a little bit is also just, again, if the product is great, customers will want to use our product. I think in this example, it is the best product in that market. Sure, you could go faster with someone that's got an inferior product, but do you really want to do that?
Just a good segue, just taking a step back and putting aside some of the larger tier one deals that you're pursuing right now. How should investors think about that global opportunity and how it's going to play out over the next few years?
I think our view of this has changed. Originally, we thought we're going to go market by market. We're going to build functionality in Australia and New Zealand and certain parts of APAC, Europe, English-speaking language countries. We were trying to go market by market. I think what we realized in a really short period of time is that the big brands oftentimes in these international markets are the big US brands. Now, that's not always the case. Australia is a good example. We have Guzman y Gomez, which is a public company, a fast-growing kind of fast casual brand. We've got another cool brand launching. There are some, obviously, real there, but oftentimes the biggest brand in a lot of these developed countries is actually a US brand.
I think what's changed is instead of us going market to market and trying to build a go-to-market motion in that local market, it's going to be partnering with the big brands and hopefully getting deployed in those markets in partnership with them.
Great. I want to quickly touch on payments, big part of your value proposition and kind of goes along with the vendor consolidation theme. Where do you see payments penetration going longer term? At what scale does it begin to meaningfully contribute to consolidated margin expansion?
Payments for us will never be anything close like it is for Toast and Square and Lightspeed and everyone else. Again, that's just the dynamic of us playing in the enterprise segment that most large, large, large restaurant business and convenience store businesses have direct relationships with and negotiate a deal with Fiserv or Global, whoever. We'll never be able to get to a price point that matters, even if we can deliver a lot of functionality. Where we have really focused on payments is in two places.
It's for our smaller and medium POS customers where we can give them a solution that's cost-effective but gives them a bunch of cool functionality, including one hand to shake from a service perspective where they literally feel like, "Okay, this is a lot easier for me." The second area we're focusing on is on our online ordering deals where pretty much all of our, I think, one of our online ordering deals, we are the processor and the gateway. That's really valuable to us because we're able to then leverage that data, comPARe that to loyalty traffic, loyalty data. It gives them a ton of insights. As we hopefully build up that online ordering business, we'll get more and more payment processing volume. It's a small business for us. It's growing. We were super skeptical we'd ever have a business here.
That's why we were slow to get to it. I think we've kind of been realized we should have gone faster, to be honest. I think it's never going to be like a 50% revenue line for us just because of the client base we play with.
Got it. I want to switch gears to financials. You've talked about your goal to keep OpEx contained even as revenue compounds 15%-20%. What enables you to maintain that level of discipline? I think last year, last quarter, non-GAAP OpEx was roughly flat. What enables you to sustain that discipline as you continue to expand globally and roll out these large deals?
Yeah. OpEx has been flat down for 18 months. Then almost over a three-year period, it's up single digits, so organic. We've been really focused on this for a very long time. Honestly, before it was the thing to do, we were pretty focused on it. As far as what enables us to do that, one is cultural. We never liked being a money-losing business. It always kind of stung us. It always made us feel icky. There has always been a focus on our path to get there is going to be continued revenue growth with holding OpEx tight. Even though our OpEx looks flat, we've made incredible investments within that OpEx, millions of dollars in internal IT systems, AI investments that we've funded from cuts elsewhere.
The other thing that's helped us, particularly on the R&D side, but a little bit on the support side, has been AI. Our teams are shipping more product today than they ever have before. That has allowed us to not have to hire nearly as many people to do what we've done before. If we can enhance developer productivity by 10%, 15%, 20%, that gives us more runway to hold that tight. I think we have yet to see the impact of AI with all the other internal processes we're going after. We have a really, really aggressive internal set of AI goals. A lot of our thinking is if we're not AI native ourselves, we can't sell AI to our customers. We push it super hard.
I think so we've seen it on the engineering side and we'll hopefully see it kind of on the rest of the G&A side over time.
Got it. I also wanted to touch on the backlog and any other trends that give you confidence in your ability to achieve at least mid-teens ARR growth in 2025.
We feel pretty good right now. We'll see how the quarter ends up. The critical points for '25 is just our rollout's going smoothly from now to the end of the year. So far, so good, but we've got lots of room between now and the end of the year, but we feel pretty good. We've got a line of sight where we need to get to, and we're generally pretty good. We've got a line of sight. It'll be driven more from our Operator Cloud business. We've talked about it in the last couple of calls, but we've got a lot of backlog that needs to get out the door. Q4, we start to see the beginning of that, hopefully the continuation of quarters, but for many quarters, but we're starting to see the beginning of that. We've got a line of sight.
It's just about getting the products out the door. It's not about net new wins or anything like that.
Got it. You have also talked about a $100 million pipeline. How should we think about if we were to probability weight that pipeline, how should we think about the conversion of it from both a timing and a magnitude standpoint?
Pipeline for us is always a year, and then we sort of break it into near-term, mid-term. I think it's impossible to sort of guess what the weighting of that is today because we have this unique dynamic of some chunkier deals in there. We have this dynamic of multi-products being the first time we've done that. It's hard to know what a historical win rate is because almost everything in there is a multi-product deal. That kind of has changed our go-to-market. Generally, we have relatively, not relatively, I think absolutely high win rates. We win a chunk of it. I think what's been exciting is that as we've rolled out ARR this year, we've been able to maintain the pipeline size, meaning it's been refreshed and refreshed and refreshed as we've gone.
Our win rates are usually pretty strong, and our pipeline is pretty specific. Just having a call and doing a demo does not get you into the pipe. Getting you into the weighting on that is super, super low.
Got it. How should we think about the flow through to the bottom line from ARR and the incremental margins on the new investments that you're, the new revenue that you're bringing in?
Yeah. Historically, I think a dollar of gross margin has gone through this flat OpEx space today. Our OpEx is about 44% of sales. That is kind of where the dropdown happens. Our software gross margins are 66%. If you remove one kind of product from there, they are 70%. A dollar becomes $0.70, and then $0.26 sort of roughly goes to the bottom line. That number will continue to expand really meaningfully because that assumes that the gross margin does not change. That assumes that every dollar of incremental still has that 70% gross margin. Generally, the most important assumption there is that you add OpEx for every net new dollar. Again, we have sort of shown that we have not.
In that example, that 70 cents of software in the last 18 months has gone pretty much to the bottom line because we haven't taken up incremental OpEx to support that one dollar. I think in general, it's a pretty high conversion. It's not consistent across products and won't be consistent quarter to quarter, but it is a, I think when we have the ability to hold OpEx tight, you can, I mean, ostensibly your gross margin dollars are your EBIT dollars.
From a capital allocation standpoint, how do you think about balancing growth investments, tuck-in M&As, and potential capital returns as PAR becomes more profitable?
Today, we're in the first two buckets. I think capital return, I've been asked about buybacks and stuff, which I think unless you're consistently generating cash flow, I don't think it's a good use of company cash to buy back your shares because you want to make sure you're there. Now we generate $8 million of cash this quarter. We're on that path. That will be a tool that we get to use in time. We certainly want to use it times like now. I think that the first two are constant, constant debate. The way I like to think about it is if you have an opportunity of incremental investment versus M&A, you always pick the internal incremental investment because you control all the variables there and you have a lot more experience.
If two things are going to generate a 20% return, one being internal, one being external, there's a lot more risk in the external because one, you're being sold by someone else. Who knows? You're not telling them the basement flooded a few years ago. You're trusting a set of projections and a product you haven't run and managed before. All things being equal, you would pick the internal opportunity if the returns were essentially the same. That's why our bar for M&A has always had a much higher IRR hurdle because we assume something is going to go wrong. We assume something is not going to work out. That's kind of how we look at it. As far as on an absolute basis, I think we feel pretty good that the OpEx space is supporting R&D initiatives.
Do I sometimes wish we put more here or there? I think we do, but we try not to be super pennywise, pound foolish. On M&A, it's just about, does the math work? Can we do something accretive day one that's accretive year two, year three, year four? Can we assume that we have a lot of downside protection because things generally never work out from an M&A deal to post-M&A deal as you hope?
With all that said, what's on your product roadmap, whether you're thinking about it from an organic or an inorganic standpoint?
From an organic standpoint, it's heavy on the AI side. We just launched our first AI SKU called Coach AI, which is in the Back Office. It's a very, very cool product where you can basically prompt and ask for store margin, your best labor schedule, your best performing store, all your operational data in a ChatGPT-like experience. Our second AI SKU is coming out on our Loyalty side where you can build a campaign, build segmentation, all by prompting, which historically was a lot of work. Now you can just say, "Hey, who should I not send promotions to because they only buy when I send out a promotion?" I.e., they're just trying to get the deal. You can now just query it versus having someone go in the system, figure that out, run. It's just like a lot. It completely changes it.
What campaign models are going to work best? Is it SMS? Is it email? Is it push? All that stuff. We're spending a lot of investment on making our products AI native and pushing that forward. The second big area of investment for us is the continued integration of our products. The more we can integrate, the more we can cross. We know it, we see it. That really deepens our moat because it's so hard to compete. If we can go and say, "If you buy these two products from PAR together, you get all this functionality you can't get elsewhere." Even if some whizzbang Stanford PhD came out with a competitive product, it'd be like, "Yeah, but if I don't, I can't get this stuff from you because you would need to have another product.
Got it. I'm going to pause there and see if the audience has any questions.
I appreciate that your focus of AI is, I think, initially more back office oriented and helping your end customer. Do you see yourself getting into more agentic solutions to interact with the ultimate customer of your customer, i.e., we're starting to see folks like Taco Bell using an agent, an AI agent to take the order at the drive-thru. Are there other things that are going to be disruptive [crosstalk] where people pull out of the business because that takes one of the [crosstalk] steps out of the ordering process?
There are a lot of ideas there. In general, you'll never see us build a consumer app, but you'll see us hopefully powering some of the examples you mentioned. Now, I don't know if we're going to be the right firm for AI in the drive-thru. There's tons of companies trying to do that. I think you could see us be AI in your ChatGPT app at some point. It is very much in partnership with our customers. We would go to our customers and say, "Hey, we can enable this on whatever, Claude. Can we partner with you to go do that?" I think the way that I think about it is if you're an ordering system, you've got to be able to enable your customers' products wherever the customers are. That means they've got to be ordering on TikTok.
They've got to be ordering on my, if I watch it, I watch a cool commercial about my hot chicken wings during the Super Bowl, I should be able to, "Hey, can you order me those?" That should all run through our ordering system is my hope. I think we're working actively on that. I do think the adoption there is going to be slower than everyone hopes. Obviously, the drive-thru thing has been super, super slow and disappointing, I think, to most restaurants and most investors. I think we'll probably see more applicability of AI still on the costing on the back office side. It's actionable. You can prove it faster, and there's a lot less risk. You screw up something with your customer, you may damage your brand. You screw up something internally, you can fix that.
I do think there's going to be slower to do the stuff that touches the customer.
Questions? I'll ask one more. I know restaurant gets a lot of attention, and that's obviously the primary part of your business. But you've also touched on the retail segment and said convenience stores are where food service is going and that PAR commands a higher price point there versus restaurants. Why is that trend occurring, and what gives PAR the right to win in that space?
We were pulled into the C-store market, honestly, unintentionally. C-stores were expanding their food offerings really rapidly four, five, six years ago and started calling us and say, "Hey, we want a loyalty program for our food program." What's sort of an underappreciated aspect of food service is that convenience stores are still growing their food offerings double digits % a year, almost 14%-15% a year. That is crazy because there's no restaurant chain growing food service 15% a year. They have stolen a lot of share from restaurants and other forms of food. We kind of looked at this as, A, we've got the technology that they need, but B, we've got to be in this category. This is disrupting the category that we sell to, to a degree.
We became a key provider of loyalty product in that vertical. We acquired a market-leading product and kind of combined the two. I think the reason we have a right to win is it's product-based. We certainly have the best product in the category. I don't think anyone is even close. The gap between us and number two is wider here than any other product we have. The customer references are incredible. We have done a really good job of having the best product, but also winning the customers over where they're coming to us and saying, "Hey, what can we do in AI? What can we do over here?
The number of convenience store customers have come to me and said, "Hey, can you build a POS for us?" It's like, I don't know, it's like half the customers have asked for that. They only do that if you're doing a great job. I think our right to win is the best product leading to the best relationship.
Got it.
Questions? Great, Savneet Signh. Really appreciate you joining us again this year. Again, thanks to everyone in the audience for joining us as well.
Thanks, Chuck.