Square Powers Restaurant Growth with New Handheld Device and Next Generation Food and Beverage Platform
Square debuts its most complete restaurant solution yet, with new, purpose-built hardware and software to drive restaurant efficiency, hospitality, and growth
Today, Square delivered new hardware and software innovation to help restaurants grow and thrive, including its most powerful, portable point-of-sale device ever and restaurant-specific features and upgrades. Hundreds of thousands of food and beverage sellers have built resilient businesses using Square's refreshingly easy technology to balance scalability and hospitality. These innovations are part of Square Releases, the company's new, twice-yearly product launch that delivers the most important new features and tools, all at once, in a way that's easy for sellers to understand and adopt.
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Square debuts its most complete restaurant solution yet, with new, purpose-built hardware and software to drive restaurant efficiency, hospitality, and growth (Photo: Square)
Square Handheld is a powerful and pocketable point of sale for all restaurant businesses. For full-service restaurants, it's taking orders tableside or from across the bar, and for quick-service restaurants, that means cutting down on lines during a busy rush. By eliminating unnecessary trips between tables and the counter, Square Handheld enables servers to provide more attentive service and turn tables more efficiently during peak hours, leading to improved customer satisfaction and increased revenue. Read more about Square Handheld's advanced features here, which include:
- A spill- and splash-resistant 6.2" Gorilla Glass touchscreen and an IP54 rating, which means it can stand up to accidental drops, water, and dust;
- A long-lasting battery designed to power through a whole day;
- A barcode scanner to quickly scan in retail offerings like merch or bottles of wine; and
- A camera for capturing photos of new menu or retail items
"Square Handheld is powerful, profitable, and predictable. It's sleek and slim, and it gives us 10x the power in the palms of our hands (and our pockets) and helps us to elevate our hospitality in the front of house," said Chad Sykora, CEO at Krootz Brewing Company in Gainesville, TX. "It's easy to be hands-free as staff members round corners. Now, they can focus on keeping food steady. Each of our bartenders and servers have been fighting over getting their hands on one!"
The newly redesigned, unified Square Point of Sale app lets restaurants get started even faster with Square and allows for greater flexibility selling across different revenue streams. It doesn't matter if a seller is a full-service restaurant, quick-service restaurant, bar or brewery, catering service, or any combination — there are now different, purpose-built modes to meet the specific complex needs of each of these workflows in one single app. This new, unified app encourages business growth, too, with restaurants able to easily add entirely new modes — say, retail — to expand their sales capabilities. And with this shift to a single, consolidated app, Square product velocity is accelerating, meaning food and beverage sellers can expect even more restaurant-specific tools they need to run their business, faster. Out of the box, Square Handheld runs the new Square Point of Sale, which you can read more about here.
"Square has gone big in restaurants, and it shows, with our product velocity accelerating to best meet the needs of new and existing sellers," said Ming-Tai Huh, Head of Food and Beverage at Square. "Square is the technology backbone for restaurants across the world, from neighborhood cafés to national chains — and with this latest release, we're giving single unit and multi-unit restaurants the tools they need to operate efficiently and to thrive in today's dynamic marketplace."
Square is also introducing a number of additional new features for restaurants to streamline service and grow revenue — without sacrificing hospitality:
- Food and beverage sellers can now get online effortlessly with our newly rebuilt, fast, high-converting Square Online Ordering page that seamlessly syncs with Square menus. Sellers will also save up to 30% on every online order with built-in, commission-free pickup and delivery.1
- The new Square Dashboard App is completely reimagined for food and beverage teams to manage back-office operations from their pocket. With operators and managers not always by their computers, this Dashboard app allows users to get real-time alerts, see cash flow, manage payroll, update timecards and schedules, send out announcements, and more — all from a mobile device.
- Sellers will soon be able to bundle multiple items at a discount with Combos, making it easier for staff to upsell and increase check amounts.
- With Item Splits, individual items can now be split across multiple checks. Staff can easily and quickly handle checkout for larger groups, reducing the time they may typically spend calculating totals and waiting on guests to work out shared costs.
- Surcharging will soon help sellers improve their margins and manage costs with the ability to pass on credit card fees to their buyers using an automatic surcharge for credit cards.
Square is also expanding its comprehensive partner ecosystem to allow sellers the flexibility and modularity to choose the right technology to power their businesses:
- Square is strengthening its strategic partnership with Sysco, offering new restaurants who switch to Square's platform the opportunity to earn up to $1,000 per month in grocery subsidies through Sysco's distribution network. As rising operational costs continue to squeeze restaurants with expenses for food and other supplies hitting record highs, this partnership will ease the burden on businesses.
- Newly streamlined Uber Eats and DoorDash integrations are built for accuracy and efficiency, from order to delivery. Now, sellers can manage menus, pricing, and orders — all within Square, with seamless real-time syncing to keep everything running smoothly. With these integrations, sellers can smooth out their cash flow and access their DoorDash and Uber Eats earnings same-day via Instant Payouts through Square Checking.2
- Resy allows sellers to streamline bookings, manage table assignments, and access detailed guest insights. Through integrations with Resy, OpenTable, and SevenRooms, sellers can streamline bookings, manage table assignments and access detailed guest insights.
- Thanx extends Square's loyalty capabilities, now delivering more advanced data insights and personalization to equip sellers with robust loyalty capabilities that drive repeat visits and maximize revenue.
Try Square Handheld and experience Square's new F&B platform in person. Visit Square at the National Restaurant Association show (Booth #5845) in Chicago from May 17-20, 2025, and don't miss the fireside chat between Ming-Tai Huh and Nick Stone (Chairman, Bluestone Lane) on May 17 at 3:30pm CT at the Innovation Theater.
About Square
Square makes commerce and financial services easy and accessible with its integrated ecosystem of commerce solutions. Square offers purpose-built software to run complex restaurant, retail, and professional services operations, versatile e-commerce tools, embedded financial services and banking products, buy now, pay later functionality through Afterpay, staff management and payroll capabilities, and much more – all of which work together to save sellers time and effort. Millions of sellers across the globe trust Square to power their business and help them thrive in the economy. For more information, visit www.squareup.com.
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1 Delivery commission saving is an estimate based on an assumed 30% commission charged by third-party delivery partners on premium plans.
2 Block, Inc. is a financial services platform and not an FDIC-insured bank. FDIC deposit insurance coverage only protects against the failure of an FDIC-insured deposit institution. If you have a Square Checking account, up to $250,000 of your balance may be covered by FDIC insurance on a pass-through basis through Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, subject to aggregation of the account holder's funds held at Sutton Bank and if certain conditions have been met.
Square Debit Card is issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Mastercard.
Funds generated through Square's payment processing services are generally available in the Square Checking account balance immediately after a payment is processed. Fund availability times may vary due to technical issues.
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