On the kitchen side, it makes it possible to better manage stocks or prepare more profitable recipes, on the dining side, it can anticipate the number of customers: artificial intelligence is coming to restaurateurs with many promises.
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Several young startups came to present their solutions at the International Catering, Hotel and Food Exhibition (Sirha), which is holding its 22nd edition until Monday in Lyon.
“The catering professions can be very difficult, we want to make their lives easier,” underlines Laurent Scheinfeld, co-founder of the Sirha-winning Menu app, to AFP.
“We choose a recipe from the database, we personalize it and the AI gives us the cost of the portion and its selling price to be profitable, based on the price of raw materials updated every day, as in the Stock market,” he explains.
“If an ingredient increases too much, we can replace it to be profitable again,” continues the entrepreneur, who believes that his recipe database, “generated by AI and verified by a chef,” can serve as a source of inspiration.
Green
AI can also be used to “green” menus. This is what Fullsoon offers, by measuring the carbon footprint of recipes and proposing several levers to reduce it: alternative ingredients, cooking times and methods, transport of raw materials, etc.
“It was a request from our customers,” Hassan-Ali Chaudhary, founder of this company created to reduce food waste, told AFP.
How does she do it? Thanks to a predictive model that allows restaurateurs to anticipate over two weeks the number of customers they will have and the orders needed to serve them “with 95% accuracy”.
“We collect all the receipts every day to know customer habits and we integrate a certain number of external elements such as the weather, possible sporting events, etc.,” explains this former data specialist within the Accor hotel group, first client and minority shareholder of its start-up.
His solution makes it possible, according to him, to reduce food waste by 30% but is only useful for “large” customers, i.e. “from three or five establishments”.
Limit errors
Against food waste, Choco, another start-up using AI, is banking on taking orders: “many chefs scribble their orders on a piece of paper, on a kitchen tile or by leaving a voice note. We train our technology to recognize and transmit these orders to suppliers,” explains co-founder Grégoire Ambroselli.
-“We have a 99.9% success rate. By limiting order entry errors, we reduce waste,” he assures.
Another advantage: while there are a lot of non-French speakers in restaurant kitchens, orders can be placed in any language thanks to the translation tool, he explains.
AI can also intervene on the room side: the reservation site The Fork is launching a new tool supposed to detect customers likely to not honor their reservations.
The predictive model takes into account several criteria such as reservation history, customer typology (new or regular), their behavior on the restaurant page, etc.
Optimization… and emotion?
And what do the main stakeholders think?
“There is a kind of ambivalence about the fear of losing one’s authenticity while having the idea that we must seize it, that it opens up lots of possibilities that we had not thought of,” estimates Johanna Edelbloude , academic director at the Lyfe Institute (formerly the Paul Bocuse Institute), which plans to integrate AI into its programs at the start of the 2025 school year.
A step already taken by its competitor, the Ecole Ducasse, which also offers specific training on “AI in the service of culinary innovation”.
“We are no longer very far from the application which will optimize the entire chain, from the order to the menu, which will allow us to gain in fluidity” and to concentrate on the kitchen, predicts Frédéric Loeb, expert in trends in the restoration.
But “there is something that AI does not measure, and that is emotion,” says Luc Dubanchet, director of Sirha. And in a restaurant, that’s essential.”
© Agence France-Presse
