Writing a Recipe for AI Success at What Chefs Want

A family-owned and operated wholesale food delivery company, What Chefs Want provides over 6,000 products to over 16,000 restaurants. In pursuit of its mission to “Wow Chefs!” by delivering fresh, high-quality foods daily, the company manages more than 950,000 square feet of combined warehouse space and 425 truck routes to serve nine U.S. states, mostly in the Ohio Valley and the Southeast.

What Chefs Want prides itself on being a market leader and disrupter, and it has been experimenting with AI to maintain that status. However, with the many AI tools on the market, it needed help identifying the best AI solutions for meeting its customers’ needs, lowering costs, and being more efficient.

Enter Centric: From AI Hype to Strategic AI Solutions

What Chefs Want reached out to Centric Consulting through our website. At the time, the company was talking to other consulting firms about AI, but we set ourselves apart with our fast response and the AI services we were already prepared to deliver.

Among those offerings are AI services that address areas like AI strategy development, governance plans, and readiness assessments. After reviewing our services with What Chefs Want, they decided to start with our AI visioning workshop.

The goal of the AI visioning workshop is to provide an engaging, collaborative way to create a strategic AI adoption and integration roadmap. It requires collaboration and learning between our AI experts and key client stakeholders. Working closely with — and carefully listening to — workshop participants allows us to better align their business strategy with AI.

Our recommendations for What Chefs Want included a three-phase general AI capability approach for AI solutions:

1. In the Adapt phase, employees learn and experiment with the AI tool to understand its basic capabilities and how to best adapt it to existing work.
2. In the next phase, Adopt, the company begins incorporating the AI tool into regular work and processes. This phase includes integration planning, training and implementation.
3. Finally, in the Accelerate phase, the organization matures its AI capability to enable exponential growth through optimization, scaling and innovation.

These phases are repeated for each AI solution as it goes through an AI development cycle, which starts with proof of value. The AI proof of value ensures each tool aligns with strategic goals and that the needed data is available. If the proposed AI tool passes that test, it must then demonstrate it has enough promise to merit an AI pilot model and further refinement. Finally, the organization must determine if the benefits of operationalizing the solution warrant the investment. If so, the AI model can be operationalized, adopted and set on a path of continuous improvement.

Underlying all our recommendations were core assumptions about governance, security and data strategy. Governance ensures responsible and ethical AI development, deployment and usage that minimizes risks and enhances stakeholder trust. Security also fosters trust because it reduces the risk of legal liabilities while safeguarding intellectual property and proprietary algorithms. Data strategy, which ensures that data is cleansed, processed and managed, also extends to procuring third-party data in a way that avoids duplication and inefficiencies.

With its comprehensive approach, our general recommendations established a methodology that What Chefs Want can now use to approach the specific AI use cases we helped them identify for both the near and long term.

The Results: Our Recommendations

Using the information gathered from our facilitated discussions, we developed a prioritization matrix and plot output that identified our client’s most beneficial use cases and a timeframe for approaching them. These tools allowed us to cluster more than 40 opportunities in more than 12 areas of our client’s value stream. Proposed AI solutions included:

• Tracking weather trends, customers’ order history and buying behavior, and any events that can affect sales
• Recommending other items of interest to customers, upselling overstocked products, or suggesting alternatives for out-of-stock merchandise
• Placing and looking up and lookup orders with chatbots
• Vision models for evaluating product quality
• Automating purchase order creation and submission
• Writing product descriptions

Our method of prioritizing opportunities provided a “stair step” model that will help What Chefs Want to build their AI capabilities. Because of our engagement and AI visioning workshops, our client now has a clear execution path that includes specific recommendations and priorities for implementing AI across multiple functions, challenges and opportunities.

Conclusion

AI can give businesses in any market an edge, but it can be especially powerful in a highly competitive market with razor-thin margins and time-sensitive products like food service. If your company is interested in implementing AI, start by familiarizing yourself and your leadership team with the technologies and terminology. You will then be ready to look up and down your value chain to identify your most impactful opportunities. Work toward those while completing AI projects you can build on over time.