【📢FOODIVAL Blog✏️】A New Chapter in the F&B Industry: The World's First AI Chef Themed Restaurant Officially Opens!

WOOHOO, the world’s first restaurant operated by an AI-driven chef powered by a large language model, was officially launched in Dubai this year! The AI chef, developed by a UAE technology company UMAI, is named Chef “Aiman” which connotes the combination of “AI” and “Mankind”. Involving in a wide aspect of restaurant operations, ranging from menu design, dining experience, environment to customer services, Chef Aiman will be leading the restaurant's operation team to continuously improve restaurant quality with unprecedented innovative ideas. 

How does AI Chef collaborate with restaurant operation and culinary teams?

As a large language model with continuous learning ability, Chef Aiman not only consolidates thousands of global recipes, cooking techniques, flavour pairing and nutrition science, but also absorbs and evolves with various food reviews, global dining trends as well as actual customer feedback. By analysing seasonal ingredients, customer preferences and food trends, Chef Aiman assists WOOHOO in enhancing their menu and recipes with innovative cooking ideas. Chef Aiman’s creator emphasizes that the purpose of AI Chef is to complement human cooking by maximizing the merits of both human and machine through combining culinary team’s rich experiences and artificial intelligence rather than to supplant and replace any human element of cooking in the kitchen with AI. The team expects both humans and AI can work hand in hand to bring dining experience to the next level. 

During the recipe creation and actual cooking process, Chef Aiman provides the restaurant team with various innovative recipes and directions for creation. After getting new ideas from Chef Aiman, WOOHOO’s head chef will conduct flavour pairing and adjustments before any new dishes are prepared and officially served to customers by the culinary team. The whole cooking process will be completely conducted and monitored by the culinary team to ensure the food is safe and qualified. This fusion of "artificial intelligence" and "human creativity" can undoubtedly create a delightful dining experience that stimulates customers' taste buds.

What else is special about the AI Chef?

Noteworthily, WOOHOO’s AI chef has built-in eco features which enable it to design recipes that can re-use ingredients that are often discarded by restaurants such as meat trimmings or fat, to minimize food waste from the source. It is expected that this green AI technology can not only foster WOOHOO’s sustainability, but also inject new ideas and directions of AI application into the F&B industry as a whole. Most interestingly, Chef Aiman is a powerful promotion tool for WOOHOO as well with its powerful database and learning ability. To make some noise, the restaurant has started a channel for Chef Aiman in various social media platforms like YouTube to share Aiman’s unique insights on ingredients, flavours, F&B tech and more, arousing quite a lot of attention online!

Is AI-driven restaurant management becoming a trend?

Apart from AI Chef, the F&B industries around the globe, including Hong Kong, have been exploring different AI technologies and automated systems that can be applied in various aspects of restaurant management to enhance customer experience, operational efficiency and cost control. For example, a locally developed restaurant procurement system, FOODIVAL, has developed an AI-powered invoice reconciliation feature that can assist F&B procurement teams in automatically extracting and verifying content of different supplier invoices. It can quickly identify any discrepancies, which significantly enhances accuracy and efficiency of the matching process by reducing workload and processing time up to 70%! Moreover, the system also enables the frontline staff to perform good-receiving processes by using their mobile phone with ease. They can simply take photos of goods delivery notes and upload them to the system. The system’s built-in AI optical character recognition (OCR) feature can recognise text on the documents uploaded within seconds, streamlining the daily good-receiving processes and alleviating the burden on the frontline by minimizing data entry and administrative work. 

With the rapid development of F&B Technology and intense competition among the industry, timely digitalization has become more essential and necessary than ever before in order to maintain and even accelerate the competitiveness of your restaurants. If you wish to improve the procurement and inventory management of your restaurants while strengthening cost control and boosting profitability, please don’t hesitate to contact our system consultants for a free system consultation and demo session here!