An exclusive interview with Mani Kulasooriya, our Co-Founder & CEO on Forbes by Tim Clark. This is a republication of the original which can be accessed here.
How big is the foodservice industry? It’s one of the largest in the U.S., with packaged food and drink worth over a staggering $1 trillion. Surprisingly, this massive sector moves slowly when it comes to adopting new technology. For 25-year food industry vet Mani Kulasooriya, Co-Founder & CEO of Cut+Dry, the slow pace of adoption is an opportunity to help digitize the entire food supply chain while introducing new innovations powered by AI.
Kulasooriya has seen how each tech revolution has shaped the food industry. The internet transformation in the 1990s, social media and mobile platforms, and even blockchain and crypto have all made an impact. But none have evolved as quickly or as dramatically as AI.
“Its rapid growth makes it clear that AI can be a powerful tool for the foodservice industry, said Kulasooriya. “When we started developing our first AI applications, we were laser-focused on the hardworking and passionate individuals in foodservice. Our mission was clear: how can we help them drive more revenue and reduce costs? That was our focus.”
Enter "Yes, Chef", an application designed to tackle top-of-the-funnel and customer support challenges, equipping distributor sales reps with the tools they need to better market to restaurant operators and expand their market share.
“Yes, Chef” didn’t happen overnight. Work on the project began in 2019, when the Cut + Dry team spent over nine months at the Stanford Research Institute, learning how to use machine learning to structure foodservice data. It took another four years to fine-tune the dataset to create the AI applications. When "Yes, Chef" was launched, it was groundbreaking—the first-ever AI technology application designed specifically for the foodservice sector.
Features of “Yes, Chef” include digital prospecting and proposal tools to increase the distributors’ book of business, data-driven AI product recommendations to sell more, in-depth insights into customer behavior, order trends, product catalogs, and tools to uncover underperforming SKUs.
“It gives the sales rep actionable insights to move inventory and increase sales,” said Kulasooriya. “‘Yes, Chef’ even gives the distributor marketing solutions to move excess products, create sales and promotions, and market products effectively. Think of it as the foodservice industry’s best assistant.”
“Yes, Chef” leverages a combination of AI technologies and methods from web scraping, Natural Language Processing (NLP), data integration, and Machine Learning (ML) to do what it does. Custom scraping technology extracts restaurant information such as cuisine types and menu details.
The Chat GPT API, powered by the GPT-3.5 Turbo model, analyzes menu text to derive ingredient lists. Machine Learning fine-tunes the AI models with proprietary product information and sales data, allowing “Yes, Chef” to offer highly personalized recommendations.
“Although the technology is sophisticated, we’ve tailored it to be user-friendly and effective,” said Kulasooriya.
Dicing up complexity
The U.S. Foodservice industry is very complex with many moving parts. With small margins, fluctuating customer demand, and very labor-intensive activities, prospecting new businesses and driving sales is critical. Currently, though, this process is very manual and time-consuming. Sales representatives from distributor companies spend the bulk of their day taking orders from existing customers via traditional methods like phone, email, text, and fax, which need be transcribed into their order and inventory management system.
“Just transcribing a five-minute voicemail can take up to 30 minutes of their day - now imagine how it is when they are managing hundreds of customers,” said Kulasooriya. “Precious time spent on the streets prospecting and acquiring new business is limited.”
That is where “Yes, Chef” comes in. It uses various AI tools to retrieve digital menus from places like Yelp. Then, it uses natural language processing (NLP), specifically Chat GPT API, to break down menu items into their respective ingredients. Equipped with this menu analysis, it uses AI algorithms to suggest relevant products from the distributor’s catalog that align with the restaurant’s menu items and then suggest new potential clients to the sales rep to follow up with. It also outputs a tailored proposal for the new prospect, which the sales rep can use when meeting the prospect.
Southwest Traders, a food distributor and early adopter of the technology, has already reported a $5.8 million increase in incremental revenue and an 18% overall revenue increase thanks to the automation of processes that were previously manual and time intensive.
"Thanks to Cut+Dry's "Yes, Chef!", our close rate is 70%—no exaggeration,” said Terry Walsh, President of Southwest Traders. “Now that our reps aren’t chasing orders, they are closing leads in under two weeks. Yes, Chef! allows them to prospect new customers in minutes, pre-build digital order guides with customer-specific pricing, send a digital proposal, and sign them up seamlessly."
Not surprisingly, “Yes, Chef” opened new doors of innovation for Cut+Dry as the company continuously refines and optimizes its AI offerings.
“AI Order Desk”, which transcribes text, emails, and calls into orders directly within Cut+Dry, makes it easier for distributor sales reps to process orders efficiently. “What Products Should We Add To Our Catalog?” is an AI-based recommendation system for catalog expansion. This feature analyzes operator keyword searches, segmentation data, and catalog data from similar distributors to recommend additional products that Cut + Dry distributor partners should consider adding to their catalog. “This helps increase their share of wallets and better meet market demands,” said Kulasooriya.
