CHICAGO, August 11, 2026 — Anyone doubting the power of AI to revamp the food-away-from-home supply chain might have revised their opinion after hearing a review during Go2MarketEdge of how the technology is already streamlining the restocking process.
The efficiencies are enjoyed today by far more than big manufacturers or restaurant chains with thousands of units and an army of IT specialists, said Mani Kulasooriya, co-founder and CEO of Cut + Dry. The company serves as an e-commerce platform connecting distributors with operators and suppliers of all sizes and stripes.
He provided real world examples to illustrate his point, starting with a single restaurant, Club Macanudo, that needed a re-up of 36 ingredients, all in small relatively small quantities. For instance, it needed just three heads of broccoli and four pints of strawberries.
Kulasooriya played the actual order placed by the outlet, a phone message that was left on the system of a distributor, presumably at the caller’s convenience. The call lasted for two minutes.
Within seconds, AI had turned the voice order into a detailed printed manifest complete with pricing and the distributor’s confidence that any particular item was in stock. A back-and-forth that might have lasted 20 minutes or more was reduced to a flash.
But that, said Kulasooriya, is mere kindergarten-level AI. He provided a glimpse of what’s happening at what he termed “middle school, high school and graduate levels.”
To illustrate what’s happening higher up the intelligence ladder, Kulasooriya recounted a situation where a distributor wanted to identify its five customers who were most likely to "churn” and buy from another source.
At the very least, AI could flag customers whose orders of a specific product had dropped precipitously, or from 5,344 units down to 19 in the example cited.
"There's no genius stuff going on here,” said Kulasooriya. “They just churned.”
But AI was used to hone in on the why. It "looked at the data and figured out that particular customer that may actually be a churn,” he explained. “The drop in revenue may just be that they're doing a lot of catering stuff, and maybe in the last 30 days they didn't do the catering stuff.”
Still, said Kulasooriya, AI isn’t even at the middle school level with that caliber of analysis.
A step or two up the ladder, the same distributor may be looking at its inventory and noticing that a particular meat supplier’s products aren’t moving. What can the broadliner recommend to the supplier to boost sales for their mutual benefit?
“To do this, you can't just rely on your own data. You need to also understand menu information, maybe some sales information,” said Kulasooriya. AI was used to analyze menu trends, check what items were generating social chatter on sites like Yelp, and even the sales data some customers agreed to share on a masked basis to foster just the sort of insights the distributor was seeking.
Those potential sales-boosting ideas were shared with the meat supplier, Kulasooriya said. But the topper was how the insights were delivered by the distributor. It prompted AI, “’Okay give me an email template that I can use, based on the information that you gave me, so that I can connect with [the meat supplier] directly and act on it,’” he recounted.
Go2MarketEdge was presented Aug. 4-6 by IFMA The Food Away from Home Association in California’s Silicon Valley. More coverage can be found here.