Baker St Cafe Builds a Neighborhood Favorite on Square
The family-owned Thai Kitchen & Bubble Tea shop utilizes Square Marketing, Square Kiosk, and Neighborhoods on Cash App to deepen its foothold on a tight-knit Oregon community
DISTRIBUTED-WORKFORCE/OAKLAND, Calif. – June 3, 2026 – Square today announced that Baker St Cafe - Thai Kitchen & Bubble Tea, a family-run restaurant in McMinnville, Oregon, is utilizing Square’s unified commerce platform to power its standing as one of the town’s most beloved dining destinations. In the two years since its founding, Baker St Cafe has established a strong local reputation enabling it to serve 1 in 7 residents* of McMinnville, and secured the Thai SELECT certification, a distinction awarded by the Royal Thai Government to just nine restaurants in all of Oregon to guarantee authentic Thai taste.
Founded by Fon Khunsamart, a Thai immigrant who grew up cooking alongside her grandmother and professional chef father, Baker St Cafe brings genuine Thai home cooking to a small American town. With Fon’s husband, Thomas Khunsamart, managing the operations and technology, and their three sons learning the business alongside them, the cafe runs as a true family enterprise. The couple relies on Square’s unified commerce ecosystem including Square Register, Square Kiosk, and Square Marketing to handle more than 5,700 monthly transactions as they focus on providing the highest quality Thai dining experiences.
Unlocking the neighborhood with Square
Square Marketing has become the engine behind Baker St Cafe’s customer attraction and retention strategy. At any given time, the cafe has more than 28 automated campaigns spanning email and SMS running simultaneously, with significant sales contributions directly attributed to their success. Even in a smaller town like McMinnville, the cafe has seen more than 700 campaign promotion redemptions. Rather than manually managing outreach, Baker St Cafe’s approach is to set up automated flows that run in the background, freeing Fon to remain focused on her craft in the kitchen and Thomas to spend more time ensuring smooth operations.
“Square is reliable and always launching new features – not staying stagnant,” said Thomas Khunsamart, Baker St Cafe co-owner. “A lot of companies roll out a product and don’t update it for ten years. Square is always evolving, which we love.”
Baker St Cafe joined the Neighborhoods on Cash App program in 2026 as an early adopter. The cafe’s growing Neighborhoods followers demonstrate encouraging engagement trends from follow to purchase. Followers also visit more frequently than the cafe’s broader customer base. For Thomas, Neighborhoods represents a direct line to the cafe’s most loyal diners, with a built-in pipeline of return visitors and a way to reclaim local market share from third-party platforms that would otherwise charge higher processing fees.
“I see a lot of people that live locally ordering on third-party platforms right away rather than trying to order directly with us even though they live locally,” said Khunsamart. “Neighborhoods gives us a way to incentivize our local customers to keep coming back. The 1% processing on online orders, repeat customers, being able to communicate directly with those followers who are clearly excited to follow you and see your updates and get deals from you – that’s what excites me most.”
Data-driven decisions, down to the menu
Thomas uses Square’s reporting tools for continuous optimization. Item-level sales reports inform every menu update: low-selling or complex dishes come off, and are replaced by items with better margins or higher customer demand. Kitchen workflow follows the data too. Sales trend history enables the team to anticipate slow days and reduce food prep accordingly, cutting waste and protecting the bottom line.
“I use the sales reports and item sales to see what is not popular,” continued Khunsamart. “When I redo the menu I take off items that don’t make much money or are harder to make. I use it to optimize kitchen workflow and replace it with a lower cost or higher ROI product that more customers will purchase.”
A kiosk that keeps up with a world-class kitchen
Baker St Cafe runs Square Kiosk as a core part of its in-store ordering flow. For Baker St Cafe, the decisive advantage is automation: every menu change made in Square pushes to the kiosk automatically, with no manual updates required. That reliability pays off across a fast-paced counter environment where keeping up with a frequently evolving menu would otherwise be a recurring operational burden.
“We switched to Square Kiosk because I don’t ever have to update it. Every time I make a change, it updates automatically,” said Khunsamart. “That just made it easier for me as the owner.”
“Baker St Cafe is a model example of what we aim to help neighborhood favorites become,” said James Schonzeit, Head of Food & Beverage at Square. “A first-generation immigrant family, cooking real food, building a community from scratch in a small town, and doing it with the discipline of operators twice their size. In just two years, they’ve made themselves a local institution. There’s so much to learn from their success.”
Read more about Baker St Cafe’s story here. Learn more about how Square powers restaurants at: https://squareup.com/us/en/restaurants
About Baker St Cafe - Thai Kitchen & Bubble Tea
Founded by Fon Khunsamart in McMinnville, Oregon, Baker St Cafe – Thai Kitchen & Bubble Tea is a family-owned restaurant bringing authentic Thai home cooking to the Pacific Northwest. Inspired by the recipes Fon grew up cooking alongside her grandmother and father in Thailand, the cafe is run by Fon, her husband Thomas, and their three sons. Thai SELECT certified by the Royal Thai Government, Baker St Cafe has become a beloved local staple known for its authentic flavors, warm hospitality, and deep roots in the McMinnville community. Learn more at thebakerstcafe.com.
About Square
Square helps businesses turn transactions into connections and businesses into neighborhood favorites.
In 2009, Square started with a simple invention — the first mobile card reader, which changed how the entire financial system thinks about small businesses. Square has since grown into a global business platform helping millions of sellers of all sizes participate and thrive in their communities.
Whether independently run or a global chain, Square understands that sellers succeed when they have the freedom to focus on the experiences that keep customers coming back. From point of sale and payments to online commerce, staff management, cash flow tools, and more, Square brings together the tools sellers need to run and grow on one intelligent platform. For more information, visit squareup.com.
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*Baker St Cafe has served more than 5,300 unique customers in McMinnville, Oregon, where the population is approximately 35,000 residents