The share of U.S. restaurant and foodservice employees who speak a language other than English at home rose from 28 percent in 2022 to 30 percent in 2024, according to National Restaurant Association analyses of U.S. Census Bureau data.
To accommodate multilingual teams, point-of-sale providers and other restaurant technology companies are adding language options to their products.
One such restaurant tech firm continuing that trend is SpotOn, a San Francisco-based company that announced SpotOn en Español on October 27. The offering allows restaurant workers to use its time clock, POS, kitchen display system and back-office dashboard in English or Spanish. Language preferences are set at the time clock, and users can also set them on the POS and KDS and in the dashboard.
SpotOn’s latest Spanish-language offering lets users toggle between languages on supported devices. Each KDS monitor and printer is set separately, so grill staff can read tickets and printed chits in Spanish while an expediter reads in English.
“Restaurants are run by teams that already work in two languages, so we felt strongly that the software should run that way too,” Bryan Solar, SpotOn’s chief product officer, said in a press release. “We went through a full shift, from clock-in to the kitchen line to the back office, and put the setting where each person can use the product in the language they feel most comfortable in: with the employee, the device, and the user.”
The expanded language options come at a time when about 30 percent of restaurant and foodservice employees speak a language other than English at home, compared with 25 percent of the overall U.S. employed workforce, according to the NRA’s March 2026 Restaurant Employee Demographics report.
The NRA found Spanish to be the most common language spoken at home other than English among U.S. restaurant and foodservice staff, with 21 percent in that category. Among major restaurant occupations, chefs and cooks were the most likely to speak a language other than English at home, at 46 percent and 39 percent, respectively.
While SpotOn en Español marked the restaurant technology company’s latest effort to make its products more accessible to Spanish-speaking staff, it is not the company’s or industry’s first attempt to address that growing need.
In 2019, SpotOn announced that its dashboard app began supporting Spanish. This June, SpotOn Express documented a Spanish-language time clock toggle that remembered each employee’s preference. Just over a month later, SpotOn Express described English and Spanish options across its POS, dashboard, KDS and time clock.
Several competitors in the restaurant technology space have also rolled out features that support multiple languages for foodservice staff.
Toast announced in October 2024 that its KDS supported English, Spanish and Chinese. A September 2025 update documented support for those languages and French across all Toast POS locations.
In fall 2024, Restaurant365 also introduced Spanish features in its mobile app. Training documentation published in July 2025 stated that the company could save training content and checklists in multiple languages to provide translation options.
In its 2025 product review, Crunchtime listed Spanish translation for its Teamworx labor and scheduling app among the year’s enhancements.
Additionally, Shift4 support documentation updated April 22, 2026, describes Spanish-language KDS settings on a per-device basis.
Multilingual capabilities also extend to customer-facing voice AI. Companies including Palona and Yelp, through its Yelp Host platform, market restaurant phone-ordering systems that support Spanish and other languages.
