For four months this year, Next restaurant in Chicago is featuring a nine-course menu with each course contributed by a different chef. One of the chefs is a 33-year-old woman named Jill from Wisconsin who apprenticed with two living masters—and one who died in 1935.
This is all being done through AI—Jill, for example, is an AI invention. Prompts are entered and refined by the restaurant’s owner, acclaimed chef Grant Achatz.
Achatz is not alone in embracing AI. Chefs, food innovators, menu developers and more are finding inspiration in this tool and using it to their advantage to create menus and recipes.
What can’t AI do? It can’t understand human emotions, feelings or the taste and mouthfeel of food. It can’t offer authenticity. Menu developers and chefs are using it carefully, then adding the human element, the craft of creation, to produce something meaningful.
So far, AI hasn’t made many inroads into convenience stores’ menus and recipe development—at least that we know of. But it’s contributing in the background. Rachel Saddler, senior manager of foodservice innovation at Tri Star Energy (Nashville, Tenn.) uses it as a brainstorming tool. “It helps me spot food trends, come up with new flavor ideas and explore different recipe options more quickly,” she said. “It helps me move ideas forward more efficiently.”
She began experimenting with it to help speed up menu development and idea generation. It helps her see the broader picture, she said, “for exploring variations I might not have considered and for seeing how a recipe could work in different store settings.” It can help her get a head start on concepts before testing them in the kitchen, too.
Market research firm Datassential is seeing AI adopted for menu and recipe development, mostly as “a collaborative tool rather than a replacement for chefs,” said Samantha Des Jardins, content marketing manager. Operators, she said, “typically use AI as an idea accelerator and to brainstorm.”
AI: A Creativity Accelerator?
Dan Follese, founder of Food Trend Translator in Tallahassee, Fla., works with companies on their product development. AI “can help me think through unique ingredients. Or I ask it for concepts or flavor combinations—for salad dressings, for example. I would have spent four or five hours really thinking through those flavor combinations. It’s like having a sous chef, a partner.”
Follese cautions that he thoroughly tests everything AI offers him. “AI is not going to replace the culinary application work, but it’s going to give you great combinations you’re not familiar with,” said Follese.
Tiffany Poe, chef, educator, AI consultant and adjunct professor at the graduate school of the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., discovered AI in its early days. “My neurosynapses started to fire like they hadn’t since I was in my 20s,” she said. She started testing it out for flavor and menu ideas, she said, and “felt like I was finally creating the way I was intended to create.”
Poe believes the intersection of AI and the chef brain is “an uncharted area of discovery and ideation.” And she’s started to work with organizations like the Culinary Institute of America on how to use AI.
And we’re at a key time, she said. “If we don’t intersect at this point, it will bypass us. We’re in the exploratory stage. What are you going to do with this moment in history? Are you going to maximize it and be in the conversation or are you going to hide in the corner?”
AI, said Mike Kostyo, vice president of foodservice consultancy Menu Matters, Arlington, Vt., “can be that sparring partner you throw ideas at. It’s a starting point.”
AI can really push the envelope on new ideas because it’s “wildly imaginative,” he explained. “Sometimes staring down at that blank page in innovation is what’s hardest. At least you have something to work with that is incredibly creative.”
John Cramutola is creating a menu for a grab-and-go convenience facility at Saint Catherine’s Village, a continuing care retirement community in Madison, Miss.
Cramutola, corporate head of culinary for Cura Hospitality (Canonsburg, Pa.,) said “the more you dive into AI, the more you realize it can genuinely act as an assistant.”
He’s using it to look at which foods and flavors are trending in that specific region, because “every town in Mississippi has its own subculture.”
And he can get that information in an hour. Without AI, he said, he would look at restaurant menus in the town, search reviews, research what people enjoy doing in that area, read trade magazines and talk to other staff. In short, the work would take days.
It’s important, Cramutola said, to put in accurate prompts and to be really granular with requests. Using AI, he said, “allows for more creative thinking.” It also frees up time for creativity: “It’s like having an additional person who can do a lot of the admin tasks.”
Brandon LaVielle is the owner of Lavish Roots catering company in Burien, Wa., and is using AI to build a digital menu library. He has around 600 unique menus he’s created, categorized by regions of the world. He can ask AI to dive into this library to build a specific menu, such as Southeast Asian with French influences.
Mining Data and AI’s Limits
Cramutola also uses AI for organization and planning. For example, if he’s working on a catering event, it will give him a timeline that includes what he needs to do and when he needs to do it.
And LaVielle uses it to forecast. By putting in food prices and the standard industry markup, he can ask AI to generate an idea of what those costs will be in the next season. This is especially helpful for catered events, for which menus are written in advance.
Foodservice contractor Sodexo uses AI to help with seasonal planning and also delves into its own data, too. “AI is helping suggest possible dishes from current trends and insights from our individual brands, including menu reports, product and ingredient lists, and other intel about the brands,” said Lloyd Mann, vice president of culinary and global executive chef.
This reduces the time for the recipe development process significantly, he said, from three days to half a day. “Our team can then focus their time on actual preparation and optimization of those recipes. There’s no way around the human element—the actual recipe testing, tasting and enjoyment of food has to come from our people, and that cannot and will not change.”
“On a larger scale, organizations are using it to make sense of their massive amounts of data,” Kostyo pointed out, which can help when developing something new. AI “does such a great job of making sense of lots of data and information,” he said.
As we face a world where technology does more, what are the downsides? AI “definitely has its limits,” said Tri Star’s Saddler. For example, she explained, it can’t replace hands-on culinary experience or human intuition about flavor, texture and customer preferences. “Sometimes the suggestions aren’t practical for real-world operations,” she said, “or don’t account for nuances like ingredient availability or equipment constraints.”
In the bigger picture, she’s concerned people might start to rely on it too much. “AI is a great tool, but it can’t replace human creativity, taste or knowing our customers and how our stores operate. There’s also a risk that if we lean on it too much, ideas could start feeling formulaic. The key is to use it as a helper, not a replacement.”
Work done by AI needs checking, said London Baker, regional wellness manager, Bay Area and Pacific Northwest for Bon Appetit foodservice management company. This is because of accuracy issues, especially with tasks that are highly complex. And learning how to use AI takes time. Users have to properly prompt it for desired outcomes. “It takes time, experimentation and patience,” said Baker.
As for long-term implications, Baker has concerns about jobs in hospitality. AI-powered kiosks and coffee stations are already prevalent and replacing humans, he said. “Maintaining that human side is essential for our industry and other industries where creativity is highly valued. It’s going to be a challenge to see that AI enhances, but doesn’t replace, the human touch.”
Long term, Cramutola’s concerned about the effect on human brains. “My biggest concern is laziness. It’s very easy to ask whatever AI platform you’re using to do all the work for you. I could easily generate an entire menu based on prompts.”
However, he said, customers can sense a menu that’s created by a bot. “There’s no human creativity behind it. So you have to find out how much you can use it before it starts using you. But I have to do my due diligence and use my judgement as a professional.”
It’s important to keep in mind that consumers still want a human touch, said Kostyo. “Consumers still prefer the food and beverage industry to prioritize human concepts. Food is a very emotional part of people’s lives and they value the work, knowledge, passion, heritage, etc. that goes into making a dish or product.”
No one can predict what the future will hold, but Datassential expects to see operators most open to using AI for technical, back-of-house tasks that directly support menu development—real-time inventory visibility, predictive equipment maintenance, waste reduction forecasting and dynamic menu optimization.
At the end of the day, said LaVielle, “if you’re not using AI, your competitors are getting an upper hand on you.”
Added Baker: “We need to embrace it because it’s coming—whether we want it to or not.”
A Food Calculator at Your Fingertips
John Cramutola, corporate head of culinary for Cura Hospitality, uses AI for kitchen math, like how many cups of pears is equal to three pounds. “I could math it out; I have formulas and references … but I can do it instantly with AI,” he said.
Brandon LaVielle, the owner of Lavish Roots catering company, uses AI to create lists of every ingredient he’ll need for specific menus. Without AI, he would go ingredient by ingredient and calculate how much he needs of each one, but now AI does the work.
AI can help LaVielle with yield testing too. For example, if he’s cooking a 25 pound brisket that typically has a 35% loss, AI can calculate much he needs to buy to serve 400 people.
LaVielle makes sure he doesn’t rely on AI too much. While he might use it to scale 150 recipes and save himself that time, if he’s in the kitchen he does kitchen math in an old-school manner, and teaches his staff members to do the same.