Experiencing 3 Useful AI’s in the Food Industry
The rapid growth of AI has emerged in the food industry. Customers can experience the benefits of the implementation of AI in restaurant chains and food manufacturers. How so?
Drive-thru Solutions in Food Industry
Take a glimpse at one restaurant chain that implemented AI before the pandemic. In 2022, Panera Bread introduced Tori, a drive-thru automated voice-ordering system. Customers were satisfied with Tori, as she allowed customers to make their orders and would then ask follow-up questions. At the end of the order, Tori reads everything back to the customer. The Popeyes restaurant chain also had success with the AI ordering system. According to Insider, the Louisiana kitchen-style franchise saw an increase in speed of service by 20%. There was also an increment in drink sales by 150%.
Smarter Pizza in Food Industry
Most recently, innovation has also peaked with Domino’s, the largest pizza company. They are collaborating with Microsoft to generate AI solutions for personalized pizza orders. The objective of the generative AI assistant powered by Azure OpenAI Service is to assist store managers by saving time on daily tasks. For instance, it will provide store managers with more time for the team and customer service. It will perform tedious tasks such as inventory management, ingredient ordering, and staff scheduling.
Domino’s partnership with Microsoft will explode in their Innovation Lab. Engineers have joined forces to accelerate the time to market for smart stores and ordering smarter pizza. The use of Microsoft Cloud and the Azure OpenAI Service will provide personalization and simplification to customers’ pizza ordering process.
Food Industry Manufacturers
Nestlé has implemented the use of ChatGPT 4.0 and Dall-E 2 to promote its products. Surprisingly, Aude Gandon, Nestlé’s Global Chief Marketing Officer stated that using generative AI provides several ideas that the creative team will further develop as content for their websites.
For instance, Nestlé used the AI DALL.E Outpainting feature to expand the scene around Johannes Vermeer’s iconic “The Milkmaid” painting. This new campaign by Ogilvy Paris’s creative team gave direction to text prompts. Then, the AI responded by generating new artwork imagery while still keeping in touch with the original “oil-on-canvas”. The milkmaid figure is extended by showing characters watching her in awe as she prepares La Laitiere. This marketing strategy promoted Nestlé’s yogurt brand, La Laitiere, and was titled ‘It’s so pleasurable to take the time’.
Another food company that has ventured into the assistance of AI is the Campbell Soup Company. They are taking advantage of the AI technology to ameliorate their software product development. To better understand their customers, the company wants to know what clients crave. Craig Slavtcheff, Executive Vice President and Innovation Officer, realized that to attract new customers, they needed “to transform innovation across the whole company”. To maintain its 153-year-old reputation, it was due to change. Their solution was the Insights Engine, a collection of tools that uses natural language processing and predictive analytics.
AI insights can analyze culinary cooking trends, and startup innovations, and monitor health and nutrition. It has been an advantage to the research team because they can develop products in less than four months. The company can also collect data from varied online and social media to determine what people were cooking and what ingredients they were using. For example, the Insights Engine provided data proving that since the air fryer was introduced, air-fried foods have increased in popularity. To the extent, that #Airfryer had more than 6.6 billion views on Tik Tok. As a result, Campbell Soup introduced the Kettle Brand Air Fried Chips to their line of potato chips.
Experiencing AI in the food industry will bloom innovations and new flavors to experiment with. There are many other giant restaurant chains and food manufacturers that are changing the concept of cooking. It seems that we have only scraped the surface of AI and its everlasting change in our dining experience.