Client: Toast – Genre: Customer Stories – Locations: London · British Columbia
Customer story films for Toast, shot inside two working restaurants in London and Vancouver
Toast makes the point-of-sale platform a lot of restaurants run on. Its international marketing team needed documentary-style customer stories for the UK and Canada, and a production partner it could trust to run them from another continent. We made the first two: a Victorian tavern near Liverpool Street and a family-run burger lounge in Burnaby, British Columbia. One shoot day each, built around what the Toast Go 3 handheld changed on the floor.
The brief
A POS company that wanted restaurant
stories, not product demos
Toast is the point-of-sale and payments platform behind a lot of restaurants: the handheld the server carries, the screen the kitchen reads, the terminal you tap on the way out. In January 2026 Neriah Kharece, Toast’s video production manager, got in touch. Toast was building a customer-story programme for its international markets, the UK and Canada first, and wanted “documentary-style customer storytelling filmed on location at restaurants, with an emphasis on authenticity, flexibility, and repeatability.”
“Problem first. Human always.
Product as proof.”
Toast’s customer-story brief
The brief that took shape was specific. Toast’s own playbook for these films puts the operator at the centre and the product in service of them: the restaurant team is the hero, the technology is the vehicle. The films had to work as sales enablement, on the website and in paid and organic social, and every one had to pass Toast’s legal team, which reviews interview questions and shot lists before a shoot, transcripts and cuts after it, and asks for substantiation behind any number spoken on camera.
Toast’s creative team is on the US East Coast; the restaurants are in London and British Columbia. Their brief asked for a partner that felt “integrated with Toast, not like a separate vendor”, precisely because, in their words, “we cannot be present and must rely on their expertise.” So the programme was ours to run: find the story in each restaurant, pre-interview the operators, write the questions, book the crews, and get finished films back across the Atlantic in a shape a product marketing team could use.
The films
Two restaurants, two
stories, two countries.
Both films are 90-second heroes with the same grammar: an operator telling their own story to camera, the restaurant in motion around them, and the Toast Go 3 shown in use rather than described. The differences come from the restaurants.
Film 01 · London
Mr Fogg’s City Tavern: a drink order in under two minutes
Liverpool Street, London · Shot 20 May 2026
Mr Fogg’s City Tavern is Inception Group’s around-the-world-in-80-days tavern near Liverpool Street, a place that, in general manager Jay Sebode’s words, “transports you back into the late 19th century”, with a games parlour downstairs and a terrace outside. At peak, “we can have 200 people in the venue.” Jay’s was the most measurable story Toast had, and he’d told it to Meg on the pre-interview before a camera was anywhere near him: waiters with pads queuing at the till behind each other, drinks taking long enough that guests wrote reviews about it. With every waiter carrying a Toast Go 3, “it can take less than two minutes from the order being taken to the drink being on the table.”
So the film is built as one drink order. It opens on the order going into the handheld, follows it to the bar, watches the cocktail built and ends with it landing at the table, with Jay and Paweł Hoppe, the senior bartender, telling you what changed along the way. Paweł’s is the line Toast pulled for the paid cutdown: before, people queued “around 10 minutes to get even a pint”; now, “we’re able to cut the wait time for drinks, usually by half.”
Film 02 · British Columbia
Bin 4 Burger Lounge: a family business, directed from 4,700 miles away
Burnaby, British Columbia · Shot 10 June 2026
Dan Blackmore’s parents ran two Keg restaurants on Vancouver Island, and he was put to work washing dishes in one of them at 13. He and his wife Sarah signed the lease on the first Bin 4 Burger Lounge before they’d settled the concept, and the business has grown, as Dan puts it, to “seven locations over a period of 14 years”. The Burnaby restaurant, where the group first trialled Toast Go 3 handhelds before rolling them out, turns out “500 or 600 burgers a day” on a kitchen line that used to run on paper. “In the past, we would have 60 pieces of paper. Now it’s 10 or 15 organized bills on a video screen.”
That’s the film: a founder’s account of customer service learned from his dad, with the technology as the thing that gives his team room to do it. Dan carries it, front of house to back, with the kitchen line running behind him. Toast’s title for the finished piece says where it lands: more time for what matters most, which is the customers.
We didn’t fly a crew to British Columbia. We booked one. Cinematix Media in Vancouver, with Karl Kimmel producing, Nils Kimmel on camera, Christian Beard on sound and Danielle Acken shooting stills, worked to our shot list, story arc and interview plan, with Meg directing the interviews live from London over a video link and the shoot streamed so Toast’s team could follow it from the East Coast. Toast’s local customer success manager, who’d signed the restaurant in the first place, was on site for them. It’s the hub-and-spoke crew model we run across the UK, stretched across an ocean: our producer, our creative, a good local crew, and a plan detailed enough that nothing depended on us being in the room.
Questions
About this project.
Here Now Films, commissioned directly by Toast’s international marketing team in early 2026 after an enquiry through this site. We handled creative development, pre-interviews, interview plans, crew, the shoot days in London and Burnaby, edit, grade, versioning and delivery. Toast’s team handled restaurant selection, legal review and publishing.
Mornings, mostly. Interviews happen before service, when the room is quiet and the light is ours to set. The product and atmosphere sequences follow, with the venue’s own staff and a handful of guests who’ve agreed to be filmed, and filming notices up for everyone else. Mr Fogg’s was a half day around a 10am interview call; Bin 4 ran from an 8am load-in to a 4pm wrap.
Yes. For Bin 4 Burger Lounge we booked Cinematix Media in Vancouver, briefed them with our shot list, story arc and interview plan, and Meg directed the interviews live from London over a video link. Where a UK crew adds something the story needs, we’ll send one; where it doesn’t, you shouldn’t be paying for flights. We are one of the world’s leading crew hire agencies, we keep a crew database of 1,000+ people for exactly this.
Toast’s legal team reviewed interview questions and shot lists before each shoot, and transcripts and cuts after. Any figure an operator quotes on camera needs substantiation, and the finished films carry Toast’s standard line that results are based on the customer’s own experience. We build those review windows into the schedule from the first timeline.
Get In Touch
Planning a customer story series?
If you’ve got customers worth filming, in the UK or somewhere we’d need to book a crew, drop us a line. Ed reads every email that comes in through the site, and the people who answer your first message are the people who’ll be on set. Our testimonial video production in London page is the place to start.
Commissioned by
Campaign
International customer stories · UK and Canada · 2026
Director
Meg Amos
Head of Production
Morgan Cartlidge
Edit · Bin 4 Burger Lounge
Tom Rodwell
Local production · Vancouver
Cinematix Media · Karl Kimmel, Nils Kimmel,
Christian Beard, Danielle Acken
Head of Post
Alexander Webb
Director of Photography · London
Freddie Parkin
Creative Director
Oliver Couch
Edit & grade · Mr Fogg’s
Alexander Webb · Alex West
Stills London
Jack Orton