By Dustin Stone, RTN staff writer - 10.8.2025
Square has unveiled what it calls the most significant expansion of its food and beverage platform to date, introducing a sweeping range of new products designed to help restaurants thrive as neighborhood anchors while scaling for long-term growth. The updates, announced during the company’s biannual Square Releases event and in a follow-up press release, reflect the growing convergence of automation, data intelligence, and financial empowerment across the restaurant technology landscape.
“Running a restaurant has never been more challenging. Shrinking margins, rising expenses, fragmented tools, and pressure to do more with less have left many operators squeezed,” reads the press release. “With so much outside their control, staying profitable – and staying present with customers – has become the real challenge. Too often, owners and operators feel stripped of control over their time, money, and future – spending their energy just staying afloat.”
The new lineup—which includes AI-powered voice ordering, advanced cost management tools, a more capable and contextual Square AI assistant, and a first-of-its-kind step into bitcoin integration for business use—aims to address these challenges head-on. Together, the innovations represent a bold push by Square to give restaurant operators greater control over profitability, staffing, and strategic decision-making, whether they’re running a single location or a growing multi-unit brand.
“Restaurants are the heartbeat of local economies, and yet they’re constantly asked to do more with less,” said Ming-Tai Huh, Head of Food and Beverage at Square and a partner at Cambridge Street Hospitality Group. “For too long, the tools available to them have been fragmented or not built for the realities of running a restaurant. We’re changing that by delivering an ecosystem that helps them thrive, not just survive.”
The updates build on Square’s deepening push to become the all-in-one operating system for hospitality. From guest engagement to payroll, inventory, banking, and capital, Square’s ecosystem increasingly mirrors the full operational stack of legacy enterprise systems—while remaining accessible to small and mid-sized operators.
This approach positions Square squarely in competition with established restaurant tech providers like Toast, SpotOn, Lightspeed, and PAR’s POS, each vying to become the platform of record for a fragmented and rapidly digitizing market. Where Toast has leaned into enterprise reporting and POS flexibility, and SpotOn emphasizes marketing automation, Square continues to leverage its cross-vertical ecosystem—anchored by its banking, payments, and e-commerce divisions—to deliver an integrated, end-to-end experience.
Among the most headline-grabbing updates is Square’s AI-powered Voice Ordering, which answers 100 percent of incoming calls, even during rush hours. Using natural language processing, the system lets guests order over the phone just as they would with a staff member, handling menu questions, customizations, and order modifications. Orders are then sent directly to the kitchen or POS, with all call summaries logged automatically in Square Messages for operator review.
The move comes as restaurants confront chronic labor shortages and rising customer expectations for convenience. Early adopters of conversational AI in hospitality—such as SoundHound, Kea, and Vox AI—have demonstrated measurable improvements in speed and order accuracy. Square’s advantage lies in its seamless integration: voice orders tie directly into the same centralized menus, payments, and fulfillment systems operators already use.
The company also expanded its Grubhub integration, joining DoorDash and Uber Eats under a unified order management umbrella. Restaurants can now control menus, modifiers, and inventory for third-party delivery channels directly within Square, eliminating the “tablet farm” problem that has long plagued kitchens.
Meanwhile, the updated Square Kiosk boasts 30 percent faster order entry, a redesigned interface with picture-based categories, and better throughput management, while Multichannel Menu Management lets operators edit and sync menus across channels from one dashboard.
Square also addressed one of the industry’s biggest pain points: unpredictable costs. The new Order Guide tool centralizes vendor and purchasing data, allowing restaurants to standardize pricing by unit and identify cost fluctuations at the SKU level. Menus can be automatically converted into ingredient lists, giving operators visibility into true plate costs and potential margin improvements.
These capabilities put Square in closer competition with back-of-house analytics platforms like MarginEdge and xtraCHEF by Toast, which specialize in automating invoice processing and cost tracking. By embedding these features natively, Square further positions itself as an all-in-one alternative for operators wary of managing multiple subscriptions.
Enhanced accounting and sales reports now also provide a cleaner view of cash flow—tracking payouts, fees, gift cards, and refunds with greater precision, a long-standing request from Square’s restaurant users.
The company also unveiled an upgraded version of Square AI, an embedded assistant that helps operators make smarter business decisions through natural-language queries. Restaurateurs can ask questions like “What menu items drive the highest margin?” or “How did this week’s labor costs compare to last?” and receive data-rich answers with visualizations.
The assistant now incorporates external data such as local weather, neighborhood events, and industry benchmarks to add contextual intelligence. Sellers can save insights as auto-updating charts, making routine performance reviews faster and more actionable.
The addition of mobile access ensures that operators can get these insights anywhere—a nod to the industry’s increasingly on-the-go management culture.
In a surprising but strategically aligned move, Square also introduced a bitcoin payments and wallet integration for businesses. Sellers can now accept bitcoin directly at the point of sale with zero processing fees through 2026, automatically convert a portion of daily sales into bitcoin, and manage digital currency alongside traditional banking in the Square Dashboard.
For restaurants that already use Square Banking, the integration offers new flexibility in managing cash flow and diversifying assets, reflecting CEO Jack Dorsey’s long-standing advocacy for bitcoin as an open financial network.
While the utility of bitcoin for restaurants remains to be proven, the initiative underscores Square’s commitment to giving operators more financial autonomy—especially at a time when traditional payment processing fees and settlement delays continue to frustrate small businesses.
With this release, Square is betting that the next phase of restaurant innovation lies in unified intelligence—AI that’s operationally embedded, not bolted on. Competitors are likely to follow suit: Toast recently began testing generative AI capabilities for menu optimization and staffing insights, while Olo and PAR are deepening their own AI integrations through partnerships.
The difference for Square is scale. Its combination of hardware, software, banking, and AI within one ecosystem makes it uniquely positioned to democratize tools that were once reserved for large chains.
In an industry where every dollar and every second counts, that level of integration could prove to be the ultimate competitive advantage.
