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ChatGPT is everywhere. Advertisers, web designers, coders, businessmen, writers, and artists are incorporating innovative generative AI technology to help them work smarter and more efficiently. Will ChatGPT overtake the food industry as well? I wanted to find out, so I asked the AI itself. The following response is ChatGPT’s unedited answer:
- “ChatGPT can significantly impact the food industry by providing personalized recipe suggestions, dietary recommendations, and virtual assistance for menu planning and food ordering. It can also facilitate communication between customers and businesses, improving customer service and enhancing the overall dining experience.”
As you can see from this paragraph, ChatGPT’s ability to generate coherent sentences is impressive. But is it correct in its analysis? And, how can those in the food industry leverage AI to improve their business models, customer retention, menu development, and overall approach. Let’s find out!
What is ChatGPT?
If your job doesn’t require you to be on top of the latest technological developments it can be easy to miss the full import of ChatGPT’s abilities. ChatGPT is the user-friendly, chat-optimized bot that runs on Open AI’s GPT program. GPT stands for generative, pre-trained transformer, and it means, in this case, that Open AI engineers pre-trained the AI to generate pictures and text in response to prompts.
GPT is a “neural network,” a program with a lot of memory space that can form connections between data points based on probability, and based on the computer spotting patterns or being trained to recognize them by programmers.
GPT’s neural network was trained on billions of parameters (datasets) containing written language, enough for it to learn to spot linguistic patterns and begin predicting the next words in sentences and the next sentences in paragraphs.
To simplify, imagine you were asked to complete the following sentence, “On my birthday, after I blew out the candles, I had a slice of chocolate ____.” Just like your mind analyzed the words and patterns in the sentence and fed you the word “cake,” GPT analyzes patterns to predict what it should generate next. It uses this ability to generate essays and answer questions.
It’s helpful to know how GPT works to understand its limitations. Because GPT uses patterns to figure out what answer to give or sentence to generate, it doesn’t actually “understand” what it is generating. Consequently, the bot often shares misinformation or gives answers that are totally off base – a phenomenon the tech community calls “hallucinating.”
To tackle these limitations, OpenAI created ChatGPT, a user-friendly chatbot that’s been taught not to say offensive or incorrect things. But, even this version of the chatbot hallucinates from time to time. Still, ChatGPT is a user-friendly version of GPT.
ChatGPT can be accessed for free through OpenAI’s website. Its technology is also incorporated into Bing’s search engine. Snapchat and other business, chat, and social media platforms also allow users to chat with ChatGPT.
ChatGPT in the Kitchen
ChatGPT doesn’t have arms and legs – it can’t dice a pepper, saute an onion, or sear a steak. But it was trained on billions of parameters, and hundreds of thousands of those were food and recipe related. In other words, ChatGPT has “consumed” a huge amount of recipe and food data, and can use the patterns that it recognized in that data to spit out new recipe and food combination ideas.
Numerous home and restaurant chefs have leveraged ChatGPT to produce recipes and cooking ideas. Search “ChatGPT recipes” on Tiktok, food’s most popular social media platform, and the tag has more than five billion (!!) views. Users report that ChatGPT is great for home cooks who want to use up ingredients that are taking up space in the backs of their cupboards. Plug four random ingredients into ChatGPT and it will generate an “Iron Chef”-esque new recipe that utilizes all those ingredients, alongside seasonings and cooking techniques that have been used with those ingredients in its training data. Ask ChatGPT for nutritional information or recipes for foods that follow a certain diet; and it can generate those as well.
ChatGPT’s Iron Chef abilities aren’t just helpful for home chefs. They can really help those in the food industry respond to customer trends and create personalized or customized food offerings. AI may be able to analyze customer data or trends and generate recommendations which business owners can then plug into ChatGPT to get ideas on how to integrate these recommendations into menus and recipes.
ChatGPT’s recipe and menu generation abilities can also help professional chefs and food scientists. A ChatGPT-like app, trained in flavors and foods, could help predict new combinations. In fact, those in the food industry are already experimenting with a “food scientist” AI, but it is not available to the general public yet, like ChatGPT is.
ChatGPT’s Culinary Limitations
Meanwhile, ChatGPT isn’t replacing chefs — it’s actually taking data from recipes that human chefs have invented, or discovered, and using those to generate new dishes for human chefs to try, in a fantastic partnership between humans and robots. In the future, there may even be more integrated, interactive recipe generation technologies where humans can try out AI recipes and give their feedback and suggestions for improving the dish. In this model, humans teach the AI and the AI teaches humans, with both working together to create the best dishes.
This is important, because ChatGPT still has a lot to learn from people about cooking. In 2022, NY Times food journalist, Priya Krishna cooked an entire Thanksgiving meal from AI-suggested recipes. Although a lot of techniques and flavor combinations were familiar, the AI-generated recipes fell short, with the turkey dry, the pumpkin cake not sweet enough (ChatGPT didn’t suggest adding ANY sugar, other than a small amount of honey), and the Indian-inspired stuffing overwhelmed by fruit.
So, it’s unlikely that ChatGPT will replace human chefs anytime soon. But, the two can work together, and those in the restaurant industry can leverage ChatGPT to inspire new dishes tailored to customer needs. For example, if there is a cool, trending ingredient, like hot honey, or a trending diet, such as plant-based, gluten-free food, you can ask ChatGPT for ideas on how to incorporate those trends into your pre-existing menu items. ChatGPT may just come up with clever, creative techniques and approaches. But don’t forget to have your human chef test out and fine-tune any issues in the recipe before going live with it.
ChatGPT on the Menu
In addition to suggesting menu ideas, ChatGPT’s generative capabilities can help restaurant owners bulk up their menus and marketing copy with appetizing descriptions.
For example, let’s say you run a vegan burger shop and you have a new item on the menu — a grilled portobello mushroom burger with balsamic seasonings, served on a toasted bun with sauteed onions and a bed of lettuce. You want this new offering to catch customers’ attention and appeal to them, so you turn to ChatGPT and request a product description matching this title.
This is ChatGPT’s unedited response:
- “Introducing our mouthwatering Grilled Portobello Mushroom Burger: a savory delight featuring balsamic-seasoned portobello mushrooms, caramelized onions, and crisp lettuce, all nestled between a perfectly toasted bun for a truly satisfying and flavorful plant-based experience.”
With only seconds of effort, you now have an engaging and vivid product description you can add to menus or adverts.
Just don’t forget to read through all of ChatGPT’s description and copy suggestions to rule out any hallucinations, possible offensive language, or typos before you publish, especially if you use it for marketing. There have been examples lately where marketing materials, published unedited, have insulted minorities, resulting in lost revenues. So don’t leave ChatGPT unleashed, so to speak.
ChatGPT Restaurant Management Capabilities
Companies are also leveraging ChatGPT to create better restaurant software. ClearCOGS, a software company, launched a ChatGPT powered bot that can take in data about restaurant and sales and answer inventory and management questions. For example, managers can ask the bot “Which menu items sold the most this week?” or “I have two cans of marinara sauce left, will I run out of it before Tuesday?” This is an example of how ChatGPT is already being used for back-end management at restaurants.
Actually, from a sustainability perspective, many are excited about ChatGPT and AI’s abilities to manage inventory and operations. This has the capacity to drastically reduce food waste and prevent spoilage. Sam’s Club is already using a robot equipped with computer vision to scan inventory and make recommendations about what needs to be ordered. It’s worthwhile to keep an eye on how AI may be able to help those in the food industry streamline supply chains and manage inventory in the future.
“Ask Instacart”
ChatGPT isn’t just helping with back-end management. Companies are also putting it to use in customer-facing operations. Instacart has integrated ChatGPT into its app. Now, home cooks can ask ChatGPT for a recipe that relates to their ingredients, tastes, or diet. After the bot generates a recipe, Instacart’s app can turn the recipe into a shopping list giving you recipe generation, shopping, and delivery all rolled into one customer-friendly format.
Instacart has announced that it’s working on a feature called “Ask ChatGPT.” This feature will allow customers to chat with the AI, asking grocery-related questions such as those related to the nutrition and prep time of items on their grocery list. Meanwhile, Carrefour, a major France-based grocery chain released a French-language video with ChatGPT generated answers to customer questions about cost and nutrition. The supermarket chain is working on integrating ChatGPT into its front-end platform as well.
If your restaurant or business has a proprietary app or a website, ChatGPT can make it more user-friendly, provide more personalized customer service, and possibly help with sales as well. Speak to your app or web developer to find out how to integrate the chat bot.
Keeping up with the Trends
Inspired by ChatGPT’s impact on the business world, Israeli-based food company, Tastewise, created a generative AI named TasteGPT. TasteGPT’s goal is to help those in the food industry keep up with food trends and customer preferences in real time. TasteGPT combs through publicly available data online, like the number of hits on recipe pages, popular grocery order ingredients, and food posts on social media.
The AI then analyzes and sorts the data, categorizing trends related to textures, cooking methods, flavors, diets, and more. Those in the food industry can ask TasteGPT questions and it will generate answers related to the data gathered. This can help companies capitalize on trends immediately, while those trends are still active.
Freshly’s, a food delivery service, has already used TasteGPT to create two new comfort food dishes based on consumer preferences. The cauliflower shepherd’s pie, and golden chicken with apricots, have become popular Freshly choices. British supermarket, Waitrose, has also used the app to design a creamy Basque cheesecake, which became a quick bestseller.
In Conclusion
ChatGPT clearly has the ability to greatly enhance the food industry and help owners, managers, chefs, and customers. If you are in the food industry, probably the most immediate ways that ChatGPT can help is by generating marketing and menu content, and by generating menu ideas and recipes. If you have a little bit of tech experience, you can integrate the AI into your restaurant app and give customers a different way to place orders and ask questions. Technology is continually developing and improving, and who knows what it has cooking on the back burner for the food industry of tomorrow.