“Today’s smart foodservice operators can benefit from a variety of AI-assisted business tools which have been designed to boost operational efficiency”

• AI menu planning apps can help you decide what to buy, how much stock to keep on hand, how much food you need to prep and which dishes are most likely to be strong performers.
• AI insights dashboards allow you to easily review sales, purchasing, recipe costings, inventory and waste data and flag any areas of concern.
• Invoice OCR can extract data from your supplier invoices to assist in inventory record keeping, recipe costing and food cost tracking

As AI technology continues to advance, smart foodservice operators are set to benefit from AI-assisted business tools designed to boost operational efficiency by reducing the time and tedium spent on various essential tasks.

For example, AI-assisted menu planning systems can analyse your menu sales history, recipe data, stock inventory, seasonality, weather and even your local event calendar to help forecast demand from your customer base. This can help you decide what to buy, how much stock to keep on hand, how much food you need to prep and which dishes are most likely to be strong performers on your menu.

AI menu planning apps can also identify which dishes are underperforming, highlight underutilised ingredients and suggest menu modifications to maximise use of your available stock.

Another rapidly evolving application is the AI insights dashboard. Instead of relying on old-fashioned spreadsheets, AI-powered dashboards allow you to easily review sales, purchasing, recipe costings, inventory and waste data and flag any areas of concern. For example, you can be alerted should the price of key ingredients rise and adversely impact your target margins for various menu items.

A further useful innovation is Invoice OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Rather than having to manually enter every line of a supplier invoice, it allows you instead to upload a photo or email of your invoice and extracts relevant data such as products, quantities, pack sizes and pricing.

This information can then be used for your inventory record keeping, recipe costing and food cost tracking. When prices rise, recipe and menu costs can be automatically recalculated, helping you identify likely reductions in your profit margins and take action accordingly.

Other emerging applications include predictive purchasing, automated prep recommendations, waste analysis, supplier price monitoring and more. Given the relatively tight margins most foodservice businesses operate under, there is strong potential for AI to boost the bottom line through reduction of over-ordering, minimising of wastage and identification of underperforming menu items.

Foodservice operators who learn how to use AI effectively will likely benefit from faster decision making and tighter cost control. The key is to embrace AI rather than fear it: seeing it as just another tool that can help boost your business efficiency, and using it to help you process more information than you have time to manually analyse yourself.