- September 3, 2026
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A look back at the top innovations of 1983 includes some happenings that lasted and some that didn’t. Consider that was the year Sony and Philips debuted CD players in the United States, after a successful start in Japan and Europe. A CD player — to jam out to Michael Jackson’s 1982-1983 smash hit "Thriller," perhaps — cost $1,000. It was also the year a company in Seattle introduced a software product it dubbed Microsoft Word 1.0.
One more 1983 debut? An unassuming restaurant opened in Pacific Grove, California, a small town on the state’s central coast. While CD players sit at the bottom of junk drawers today, 43 years later, and Microsoft Word 1.0 is but a distant memory, that restaurant — First Watch — has become an innovative force in the restaurant industry. It has led trends in everything from daytime only hours to a waitlist software app for customers to internal culture processes that have garnered the company national recognition as a top place to work multiple times.
While not the debut CEO back in 1983, the current First Watch Restaurant Group CEO, Chris Tomasso, sets the tone for the $1.2 billion, east Manatee County company’s innovative approaches and strategies. Tomasso, who grew up in Sarasota — his first job was as a dishwasher at Amish staple Der Dutchman while in high school in the 1980s — was named president of the company in 2015 and CEO in 2018.
Among hospitality insiders, Tomasso is seen as a genuine leader who, along with a competitive streak, cares about the industry in general and is often invited to give keynotes at conferences and events. Something he gets a lot of, says Eleni Gates, who worked alongside Tomasso at First Watch for nine years in investor relations and corporate communications leadership roles, is people coming up to him saying some variation of “I love First Watch” or “you all are doing a great job.”
Gates says innovation at First Watch under Tomasso isn’t an accident. He encourages people to try things, take chances, and, if it doesn’t work out, recognize it and move on. Tomasso himself is in that category. Like the time, Gates says, he played a lead role in redesigning the menu to have a whimsical, Alice in Wonderland theme. It was a bust, and it was pulled shortly after its debut. Tomasso talks about it today as an object lesson to try new things and fail fast.
“Since day one, he has always encouraged me to try new things and come up with new ideas,” says Gates, who Tomasso hired at First Watch in 2015 when he was chief marketing officer and who now runs her own company, Gatehouse Communications Strategies. “And that it’s OK to fail.”
Tomasso pairs innovation with relevancy. “If you’re not innovating,” he says, “you will eventually be irrelevant.”
At the same time, innovating and encouraging risks doesn’t equate to doing too much, too fast at First Watch. The company has some 640 restaurants in more than 30 states — about 10 times the amount of locations it had when Tomasso joined the business. That was in 2006, when he was named chief marketing officer after a three-year stint as vice president of marketing for Cracker Barrel.
Back then, First Watch’s innovation was somewhat connected to its nimbleness, given it didn’t have separate departments for purchasing, culinary or real estate. Under Tomasso’s leadership, the company has surpassed several milestones, in addition to new cities and sales goals. One is an IPO, in October 2021, which raised $182 million. And earlier in 2021, in July, the company moved into a new east Manatee County headquarters. Built by Benderson Development, the two-story, 39,000-square-foot complex, innovative in and of itself, includes a state of the art fitness center for employees; a culinary suite for menu testing; and a high-tech training room and recreational area for the company’s First Watch Academy of Restaurant Management (FARM), which brings managers from across the country to the area for one week of immersive training.
Expansion in locations, Tomasso says, is designed to be steady and consistent. He talks about the company’s growth in baseball terms, saying the strategy is to play small ball, and hit doubles and singles regularly over time — not just go for a big home run.
Playing small ball includes, Tomasso says, remembering where you came from. Today, First Watch has four senior vice presidents and seven C-suite leaders, including Tomasso. That fits, given the company has more than 17,000 employees. But there was a time, early in his tenure, when First Watch’s senior leadership team was made up primarily of Tomasso and co-founder and former CEO Ken Pendery. A beloved company leader who left a major impact on Tomasso and many others, in and out of First Watch, Pendery died at 70 years old in 2024.
Even with a smaller C-suite, says Tomasso, First Watch had plenty of innovation during that era, when it brought a higher-end competitor to a market dominated by big chains like Denny’s, Perkins and Bob Evans. “Disrupting the legacy family dining market takes innovation,” he says.
Two other keys to innovation at First Watch: It can be in areas that have nothing to do with technology, and innovation can also be found in going back and changing opinions on something when new information is available.
On the non-tech side, consider the menu item avocado toast. First Watch put the millennial staple on its menu in 2015 — long before other chains added it. First Watch was also ahead of competitors in introducing a robust juice menu, with choices like the Purple Haze (lemon, cane sugar, butterfly pea flower tea and a hint of lavender) and the Kale Tonic (Kale, Fuji apple, English cucumber and lemon.)
On the second side of innovations, the confidence to reconsider previous decisions, Tomasso says that kind of innovation requires honest and open conversations, where you shelf the ego. First Watch often does that at what he calls “get out of the pool meetings.” These take place at his family’s home in South Carolina, where senior vps and other leaders meet and have blue sky-like, agenda-led conversations, where they cover issues big and small.
One meeting ended up focusing on adding alcoholic beverages. That was long considered a hard-no at First Watch: bottomless mimosas weren’t on par with the brand. But after going over pros and cons, the company decided a small menu, now called boozy, can add a new dimension without diluting its family-friendly model. Other innovations that have come out of meetings like those, Tomasso says, are as simple as bringing back complimentary coffee while you wait for a table — which was 86ed during the pandemic — or the type of fruit on a plate or the portion size of the bacon.
All the choices and meetings and conversations, says Tomasso, go toward a stay-ahead-of-competitors mantra, which is why innovation remains important. “We don’t rest on our laurels,” Tomasso says. “We are always looking around the next corner to see what’s coming, and to see where we want to be.”
