AI-Powered Menu Planning That Puts Time Back in Experts’ Hands
AI powered culinary companion gives dietitians and menu planners their time back.
The Business Opportunity
One of the world’s largest food service companies faced a complex challenge: create menus that balance strict nutritional regulations, shifting supply chain realities, and cost control, all while keeping customer satisfaction high. The existing menu update process demanded significant manual work from dietitians and culinary experts, slowing responsiveness to market changes. Partnering with Palantir, a leading AI technology provider, the organization sought a way to leverage AI/ML and internal data to make menu updates faster and more cost-effective.
Inspired Consulting
Stone supported the cognitive data services team, taking early proof of concept work and turning it into a multi-team roadmap and backlog of priorities. Stone brought together cross-functional teams to workshop needs, define expectations, and align tool capabilities with available data. By applying structured transformation ownership, Stone ensured AI enhancements targeted real operational pain points and kept end users engaged through continuous comms, live demos, and collaborative backlog prioritization. The Stone approach kept momentum high despite data-related setbacks and built genuine excitement for the eventual solution.
Meaningful Results
Stone prioritized speed to value and within months our team delivered measurable impact. Three lines of business implemented versions of the tool, using it either within their menu systems or via an AI-powered dashboard for pricing and inventory decisions. The team spends 30% less time refining menus, reclaiming hours for client engagement. Real-time dashboards cut manual checks from minutes to seconds, while AI recipe optimization delivers recipe replacements in under a minute.
Why We Loved This Project
Early proof of concept work dazzled senior leadership, but it was critical to keep momentum up all the way to a live product. Initial goodwill can go sour fast, and we knew it was critical to everyone’s success that this initiative went live and proved valuable enough to expand to new lines of business. This project turned AI from a buzzword into a trusted partner in daily work and reimagined a day in the life. We shifted people from repetitive data reviews to high-value, client focused activities, getting people out from behind computers and back in front of customers.