Olo Goes to ICR. Why Public-Company Restaurant Tech Still Matters.

It is 1:38 PM ET on Tuesday and I have three browser tabs open, one of those second monitors that engineers warned me would ruin my eyesight, and a Diet Coke that has gone flat in the way only NRF-week Diet Cokes can. Tab one is the ICR Conference 2025 agenda. Tab two is the Olo investor relations page, refreshed twice in the last ten minutes. Tab three is a Slack DM from an operator I trust — a regional VP at a fast-casual brand you have eaten at — that says, in its entirety, “watching?” I am watching. So is, by my rough count, every restaurant-tech analyst with a Bloomberg terminal and a working pair of AirPods. In twenty-two minutes, Olo’s management team will walk on stage in Orlando and tell a room full of generalist consumer-and-tech investors why a multi-tenant SaaS company that helps Cava take a digital order and route it to a kitchen still matters.

I think they are right. I think they have to be right. And I think today is the most important public-company restaurant-tech data point of the quarter — more important than anything that happened at NRF yesterday, more important than the half-dozen private-company funding announcements that will spill out of ICR’s hotel lobbies between now and Wednesday night, and more important than whatever the consensus call on restaurant SaaS happens to be on the morning of January 14, 2025.

That is a strong claim and it is, I admit, partly an editorial one. So let me walk through it the way an operator would: from the stage Olo is about to step onto, into the operator base it serves, into the product surface area it actually owns, and out the other side into the strategic-optionality questions a public-company restaurant SaaS at this scale tends to attract once it has been left alone in a market long enough.

What Olo brings to ICR today

The bare facts are these. Olo (NYSE: OLO) announced on January 7 that it would present at the ICR Conference 2025 in Orlando on Tuesday, January 14 at 2:00 PM ET, with the standard 1-on-1 investor meeting cadence wrapped around it. The announcement itself is at businesswire.com/news/home/20250107792718/en/Olo-to-Present-at-the-ICR-Conference. The presentation will be webcast through the IR site at olo.com/newsroom. Mark it on your calendar if you have not already; the replay will be up by tomorrow morning but the room reads differently when it happens live.

ICR is, for those who do not live in the restaurant-tech calendar, the consumer growth-and-public-company conference of the early year. It is the conference where restaurant brands, retailers, and the vendors who serve them go to talk to the buyside before earnings season turns the lights off for six weeks. The presenters tend to be CEOs and CFOs. The audience tends to be portfolio managers who own the stock, portfolio managers who are deciding whether to own the stock, and a thin layer of sell-side analysts running between meetings looking like they have not slept since the Sunday flight in. The room is small. The stakes are not.

What I expect from Olo today, in rough order of how much I will be listening: a fourth-quarter business update that gets ahead of the February earnings print without breaking quiet-period rules; a refreshed framing of the Order, Pay, and Engage product modules and how they cross-sell into the same operator base; commentary on the average revenue per location (ARPU per location, in the company’s preferred framing) trajectory; and a forward-looking statement about how the dispatch and payments surface area is going to be monetized in 2025 against the backdrop of a delivery channel that is no longer growing the way it did in 2021. If they go further than that — if they hint at a more strategic move, a more pointed channel partnership, or a more aggressive payments attach — that is when this presentation becomes a real event and not a placeholder.

The reason I am paying this much attention to a single conference presentation is that public-company restaurant SaaS has gotten quiet in a way that I do not think is healthy. Toast prints earnings. Olo prints earnings. PAR Technology prints earnings. The rest of the conversation — and there is, genuinely, a lot of conversation — happens in private. Private companies are great. Private capital is great. But the disclosure asymmetry matters. When an operator sits down to negotiate a renewal with a vendor whose financials they cannot see, they are negotiating in the dark. When Olo stands up on stage today, the lights are on for an hour. Operators should use that hour.

The 600-brand operator base, decoded

Olo is not a story-stock. It is, at this point, a substrate. The thing that makes it interesting to me as an operator correspondent is that the operator logos on the back of its sales deck are not aspirational — they are real, they are large, and they are the brands that are setting the pace for the rest of the segment. Cava. Wingstop. Five Guys. sweetgreen. Shake Shack. These are the brands that other operators in their categories quietly benchmark against, the brands whose digital-mix numbers get screenshotted and passed around on operator group chats, the brands whose vendor stacks get studied like Talmudic texts.

The reason that matters is not the logos. It is that these brands have made a choice — repeatedly, over many vendor-selection cycles, with sophisticated internal teams perfectly capable of building it themselves — to run their ordering and dispatch surface on Olo’s rails rather than on something they own. That is the kind of decision that gets re-examined every renewal, and the fact that the re-examination has, by and large, kept landing on the same answer is the most underrated fact about this company.

When I talk to operators about Olo, the conversation tends to follow a pattern. It starts with a complaint — usually about latency, sometimes about a particular DSP handoff, occasionally about a feature that took longer to ship than the operator wanted. Then it shifts. The complaint is real, the operator says, but the alternative is worse. The alternative is hiring fourteen engineers, integrating six DSPs, maintaining the integrations forever, hiring a team to monitor the integrations, hiring a second team to handle the menu sync problems that surface when the first team fixes the integration problems, and then doing the same work for the next DSP that emerges. That is not a complaint about Olo. That is a description of why Olo exists.

There is a deeper version of this. When a brand like Cava grows from 200 to 350 locations, the cost of replacing the digital substrate is not linear — it is super-linear, because every additional location adds menu surface, every additional menu surface adds integration surface, and every integration surface adds the kind of slow-burning operational risk that ends up on a CFO’s desk in the form of a refund line on a P&L. Operators with growth in their plan tend to default to the substrate. That is the Olo flywheel.

What I will be looking for in the ICR deck is whether the company puts numbers around this. The operator-facing pitch is well-rehearsed; the investor-facing pitch needs to translate it into ARPU per location, multi-product attach (Order plus Pay plus Engage), and the net revenue retention number that, more than anything else, tells you whether the substrate is widening or narrowing inside its installed base.

Why ordering-dispatch isn’t a commodity

The lazy story about Olo — and I have heard versions of this from investors, from analysts, and from operators who should know better — is that ordering and dispatch is a commodity. The argument goes: any halfway-competent engineering team can build a digital ordering surface. DSP integrations are well-documented. Stripe handles payments. So why is anyone paying Olo a percentage of digital revenue when they could rebuild this in a quarter?

The answer is that “anyone” can build a digital ordering surface and “no one” can build a multi-tenant, multi-DSP, menu-syncing, surge-handling, refund-reconciling, regulatory-compliant ordering surface that survives 600 brands’ worth of edge cases. The reason Olo is hard is not the happy path. The happy path is easy. The reason Olo is hard is the unhappy path — the corner cases, the failure modes, the operational discipline of running a system that has to be right at 12:30 PM on a Friday for a 90-location chain pushing through its lunch rush. That work is not glamorous and it is not, on a slide, very investor-friendly. But it is the moat.

I have written before — and will write again, probably this week — about how the DSP layer is itself becoming more complex, not less. As our later coverage of the DoorDash Commerce Platform argues, the platform layer is starting to push back into the restaurant stack in ways that an aggregator-of-aggregators like Olo has to either welcome, fight, or partner around. The “or” matters. Olo’s strategic position is that it is the place where brand-direct digital ordering and DSP-mediated demand converge, and the more complicated that convergence gets, the more valuable that position becomes.

There is a related point about payments. When operators move from “Olo handles my ordering” to “Olo handles my ordering and a meaningful share of my payments,” the unit economics change. Payments attach is not just an ARPU lift; it is a moat extender, because the deeper the payments integration goes, the higher the cost of replacing the substrate. Investors have been waiting to see Olo Pay attach show up in the numbers in a clean way. I think today is when management starts to put a clearer frame around it, even if the hard numbers wait for the February print.

Strategic-optionality scenarios

I am going to be careful here. This is the section where, on a less-disciplined publication, I would speculate freely about what could happen to a public-company restaurant SaaS that has solid fundamentals, a quality operator base, and a market capitalization that does not, on a generous read, reflect the strategic value of its installed base. I am not going to do that, because speculation in this segment is what gets operators in trouble.

What I will say is this: when a multi-tenant SaaS company in a category like this trades at a discount to its strategic value, the universe of outcomes tends to widen rather than narrow. Strategic-optionality scenarios that an operator should at least think about include continued public-company independence (the base case, and the case I would have weighted highest a year ago); a strategic combination with another restaurant-tech platform that lacks Olo’s ordering and dispatch surface; a private-equity-led take-private structured around the operator-base annuity; and a reverse-merger or carve-out structure that I think is unlikely but which I have heard floated by people whose floats I take seriously.

None of these are predictions. None of these are even base cases. They are scenarios that an operator should hold loosely in mind when watching today’s presentation, because the way management answers questions on stage — and the way they handle the inevitable “and how are you thinking about strategic alternatives” question that some buysider will ask — is going to tell you which scenarios management is taking seriously and which they are not. In a piece we later publish on restaurant-tech M&A, I am going to come back to this and walk through the scenario math in more detail; today I want to flag the question, not answer it.

What an operator should hold in their head, watching this presentation, is that the answer to the strategic-optionality question matters less in the next quarter than in the next three years. A vendor that is acquired changes. A vendor that goes private changes. A vendor that stays public, with disciplined capital allocation, also changes. Operators who plan their multi-year vendor strategy around a static view of Olo are operators who will be surprised in 2026. I am not in the business of being surprised.

What I am listening for in the Q&A

The presentation itself is going to be polished. The presentation is always polished. The interesting material at an ICR-style event is in the Q&A. There are five questions I will be straining to hear answered today, and I would encourage every operator and every analyst in the room to push on them in the 1-on-1s.

The first is net revenue retention in the enterprise tier. Olo’s enterprise customers are the locomotives. If NRR in the enterprise cohort is north of 110 and trending in the right direction, this stock is undervalued. If it is in the high single digits or trending the wrong way, the strategic-optionality conversation gets louder fast. Management will not give a clean number; they will give a directional frame. The directional frame is the answer.

The second is Olo Pay penetration into existing Order customers. This is the cross-sell question. The slide will show a number; the answer is whether the slope of that number is accelerating, decelerating, or flat. Acceleration means the substrate is widening. Deceleration means there is more friction in the payments rip-and-replace than the company has previously suggested. Flat means we are in the long middle of an integration cycle.

The third is the DSP relationship. Olo sits between operators and DSPs. As DSPs themselves move more aggressively into the merchant-software stack, the position in the middle gets both more important and more fraught. I want to hear management talk about how they are managing the relationship — how aligned they are with DoorDash, with Uber Eats, with the long tail. I want to hear how they are thinking about the DoorDash Commerce Platform initiative in particular, even though they will not name it.

The fourth is location growth versus location churn. Olo reports a location count. The location count is a vanity number unless you decompose it. I want to hear about gross adds, gross churn, and the mix between the two — and I want to hear it in a way that lets me triangulate against the publicly available count.

The fifth is the AI question. Every restaurant-tech presentation in January 2025 is going to have an AI slide. Most of them will be slop. The interesting version of the AI slide, for Olo specifically, is the one that talks about how AI changes the ordering experience at the consumer surface, how it changes the dispatch logic at the platform surface, and how it changes the operator workflow at the back-of-house. If management hits all three, this presentation is a 9. If they hit one, it is a 6. If they hit none, it is a 4 and I will need a second Diet Coke.

The macro backdrop that nobody in the room will mention

I am writing this on Tuesday, January 14, with the Trump inauguration six days out and the EU AI Act’s general-purpose-AI provisions coming into force on February 2. Neither of these is in Olo’s prepared remarks. Both of them matter to Olo’s operator base over the medium term — the first because the regulatory and trade backdrop for consumer-facing technology is about to shift, the second because Olo’s largest operators have European footprints and are going to have to make compliance decisions about the AI surface in their loyalty and personalization stacks that, eventually, will route back through their vendor stack.

I do not expect management to talk about either of these on stage today, and I would not, frankly, want them to. ICR is not the venue for macro-political commentary. What I do expect — and what I think operators should expect — is that the questions coming out of the 1-on-1s this afternoon and Wednesday morning are going to start probing at the edges of these. A thoughtful management team will have answers ready. A complacent one will not. The difference between the two is the difference between a vendor I would underwrite for the next three years and one I would not.

The other macro thread worth flagging is that the public-restaurant-tech tape has been strange. Toast has had a difficult run-up to ICR. PAR Technology is in a different part of its lifecycle. Olo is, on a forward-multiple basis, trading at a level that does not, in my view, reflect the strategic value of the operator base. That is a setup that tends not to last forever. Whether it ends with a multiple re-rating, with a strategic event, or with management buying back stock aggressively is the open question of the year.

What an operator should ask Olo’s IR team this week

If you are an operator reading this — and if you are, hi, please email me — there are three conversations worth having this week. The first is with your CSM at Olo, who should be at ICR, and who should be available for a 30-minute drop-in if you can grab them between meetings. Ask them about the product roadmap for Pay and for Engage. Ask them about the dispatch enhancements that have been previewed but not shipped. Ask them, gently, about whether the cadence of releases is going to change in 2025.

The second is with your account executive at whichever DSP you do the most volume with. Ask them, directly, how they are thinking about the Olo relationship. The answer will tell you more about the next twelve months of your digital P&L than any vendor slide ever will.

The third is with your CFO. Sit down on Thursday, after ICR has wrapped, and walk through your digital revenue, your DSP fee load, your Olo cost, and your payments cost as a percentage of digital sales. If those four numbers, in aggregate, are trending the wrong way, you have a problem that is not Olo’s to solve — but it is a problem that the conversations you have at ICR can inform. Use the week.

What I think happens after 3 PM

The presentation ends at roughly 2:30 ET. The IR team does Q&A in the hallway until 2:45. The first 1-on-1 starts at 3:00. The interesting reads, from where I sit, come from the cluster of analyst notes that drop between 4:00 PM and 6:00 PM today. I will be reading them carefully — not because the analysts know things the management team did not say, but because the way the analysts choose to characterize what management said tells you what the buyside actually heard.

By Wednesday morning, the stock will have either drifted, popped, or sagged. None of those three outcomes will tell you very much about the underlying business; the public-restaurant-tech tape is thin and the marginal buyer at ICR is not the marginal buyer on a normal Wednesday. The more useful read is what happens to the stock in the week between now and the February earnings print. If management said something on stage today that has changed minds, you will see it in the tape over the next ten trading days. If they did not, the tape will be quiet.

What I will be watching for in my own coverage, beyond the stock, is whether the operator conversation shifts. Operators are the leading indicator. When operators start telling me, in DMs and at conferences and over drinks, that they are reconsidering their multi-year Olo posture — either toward more spend or away from it — that is the signal that something has actually changed. Today’s presentation, by itself, will not move that conversation. The presentation plus the next two weeks of follow-up plus the February print might.

Operator takeaways

The reason I think today matters is not because of what is going to happen on stage. It is because of what the existence of this stage means. Public-company restaurant SaaS, at Olo’s scale, is one of the very few places where operators can get a forty-five-minute, on-the-record, regulator-supervised window into the substrate that runs a meaningful share of their digital revenue. That window is rare. It is valuable. And it is, I think, undersubscribed by the operators who would benefit most from it.

For the cost of an open browser tab, you get a CEO and a CFO standing on a stage explaining what they are doing with your money, your data, and your operational dependency. You do not have to read the deck. You do not have to listen to the prepared remarks. But the Q&A — the Q&A is worth your forty-five minutes.

Here is what I am taking away into the rest of the week, ahead of the presentation actually happening, with the caveat that I will write a follow-up note tomorrow morning that may revise any of this:

• Olo’s operator base is the asset. The product is the substrate. The substrate is sticky because the alternative is fourteen engineers and a permanent ops headache, and operators with growth in their plans default to the substrate.
• The interesting numbers today are enterprise NRR, Olo Pay attach, and gross adds versus gross churn. The vanity numbers — total location count, total brand count — are not the story.
• Strategic-optionality is a real conversation, but it is not a 2025 Q1 conversation. Operators planning multi-year vendor posture should hold the scenario set loosely. Anticipated outcomes range from continued public independence to a private-equity-led take-private; I am not predicting any of them today.
• The macro backdrop — Trump inauguration, EU AI Act, DSP platform moves — is not in the prepared remarks but is in the conversation. The thoughtful management teams will have answers; the complacent ones will not. Listen for the difference.
• Public-company restaurant SaaS at this scale is more important than the market is currently pricing. The fact that the stage exists is itself a structural advantage for operators. Use the stage.

It is 1:54 PM ET. The webcast is loading. The Diet Coke is still flat. My DM thread with the regional VP has been quiet for six minutes, which in operator-time means he has gone to grab another coffee and will be back at 2:00 PM sharp. I will be here. I hope to see you in the chat.

— Priya files The Operator. Tips: tips@tabletransfers.com.