Olo—founded as GoMobo 20 years ago—was an early adopter of the digital ordering movement. Yet in 2025, the tech company still finds itself only scratching the surface.
Last year, restaurants using Olo’s digital solutions earned roughly $29 billion in sales volume. It’s a big figure, but not so large considering digital orders represent just 18 percent of sales in the restaurant industry.
If you were to include nondigital orders—the remaining 82 percent—there’s potential for Olo to process approximately $160 billion in total. For restaurants, that’s a lot of sales data going unnoticed that Olo can help identify.
“There’s a huge runway ahead of us and this sense of urgency from the restaurant customers, restaurant brands, to use guest data as a way of personalizing communications and the guest experience for guests and having a better way to drive profitable traffic,” says Olo founder and CEO Noah Glass.
Olo has worked toward learning about nondigital customers for a few years now.
In July 2023, the company announced that its payment platform, Olo Pay, would begin supporting card-present transactions—nondigital orders that restaurants couldn’t previously gather data from—through self-service kiosks. Olo later announced partnerships to extend Olo Pay’s card-present technology and the ability to capture nondigital customer data to traditional POS systems, NCR Voyix, Qu, and TRAY.
It was still narrow. The company wasn’t able to serve restaurant customers that didn’t partner with one of those three POS systems. That changed when it teamed up with FreedomPay, a payment gateway terminal provider with over 1,000 POS integrations. It accelerates Olo’s time to market and allows it to sell and deploy Olo Pay card-present into a majority of locations instead of integrating with one POS partner at a time.
Glass expects the FreedomPay integration to be generally available by mid-2025 to most of Olo’s 750-plus brand customers.
“We already have our go-to-market team out talking to our customers about all those great things you heard about Olo Pay card-present and that you can do it as well through FreedomPay faster than if we had to go POS by POS,” Glass says. “We have over three dozen different point of sale partners, NCR being the largest overlap. But it’s a really fragmented space, this enterprise POS space. And so this gives us the big unlock of whoever your POS partner is effectively, you can do Olo Pay card-present with FreedomPay payment terminals acting as this gateway in between.”
Pilot brands trying out card-present payments are noticing that transactions are processed faster and that they can keep track of sales and manage finances more easily.
“If you think about what FreedomPay represents, it’s the ability to pay with Apple Pay, with Google Pay in the card-present environment … When you actually tap or dip your card or swipe your card, how fast does that get processed? There are still some very clunky legacy processors where you’re waiting and the circle of death is spinning or the hourglass of death is spinning. You’re like, ‘When is this going to process?’ That idea of just a quick processing experience is a delightful payment experience for the guests,” Glass says. “And then for brands, what we’ve heard from operators is better reporting because everything is in one dashboard. And when I need to do reconciliation, everything being in one dashboard is a huge convenience in reconciling versus I’m doing my traditional payments card-present with some legacy payment processor and I’m doing the digital payments with Olo Pay and I have two different processors that I have to resolve back to my bank statements.”
The initiative will help Olo drive its guest data flywheel strategy, or increase the number of brands using all three of its suites—Order, Pay, and Engage. Order and Pay generate data, which Engage then uses to personalize communication and enhance the customer experience. This creates a cycle where more orders lead to more data, which improves personalization and drives even more orders.
California Fish Grill is an example of the potential. In six months, it generated a 41 percent increase in known guests, a 21 percent rise in contactable guests, and $7 million in digital order revenue attributable to personalized marketing campaigns.
The brand earned $7 million without discounts. The messaging drove traffic from existing guests and boosted the relationship without cheapening the brand.
That’s why Glass believes gathering as much customer data as possible—both digital and nondigital—is the key to success for restaurants moving forward.
Over his 20 years in the industry, he’s seen that when input costs rise, restaurants typically raise prices. Eventually, customers react to higher prices by visiting less frequently. To counteract this, brands often resort to value menus and price drops, which may temporarily boost sales for franchisors but hurt franchisee profitability. He recalls past conflicts between franchisees and franchisors over low-profit meal deals, which, while beneficial for the brand in terms of royalties, led to store closures and bankruptcy. Glass says this reliance on discounting can damage customers’ perception of value and make them reluctant to pay higher prices in the future.
He emphasizes the importance of attracting profitable customers by better understanding their preferences. He believes that targeted marketing—tailoring messages to individual customers rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach—can drive more frequent visits. For example, if a customer who prefers plant-based options receives information about new plant-based dishes instead of unrelated offerings, it can increase their likelihood of returning.
He explains that by recognizing individual preferences and sending personalized marketing messages through various channels, brands can increase customer engagement and encourage them to try new menu items. This strategy builds traffic and enhances the lifetime value of customers by exposing them to more options, similar to how platforms like Netflix or Spotify recommend content based on user data.
“It’s harmful over the long term to just rely on this price war discounting game as a way of driving traffic,” Glass says. “And so we’ve been preaching for several quarters now the importance of driving profitable traffic—and ‘profitable’ being the operative word—that you can do that if you better understand what resonates with your guests.”
