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, the slow pace of adoption is an opportunity to help digitize the entire food supply chain while introducing new innovations powered by AI.
“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.
“Yes, Chef” leverages a combination of AI technologies and methods from web scraping, Natural Language Processing , data integration, and Machine Learning to do what it does. Custom scraping technology extracts restaurant information such as cuisine types and menu details.