Unlocking AI Tools Like ChatGPT for Chefs: A Practical Guide
How AI can change the game for the Chefs?
Chefs and Restaurants owners are starting to use AI tools like ChatGPT mostly to create marketing content for their social media presence. Yet most of the potential of AI stays untapped.
New AI tools can act like a personal assistant or co-pilot, so the Chefs focus their creativity, time and energy hands-on in the kitchen with their culinary team.
Let’s look at usages of AI tools beyond generating social media posts:
- Translation of the Menu
- Brainstorming for content creation
- Recipe adjustments and cater for diet restrictions
- Pricing Tactics
- Waste control and meal planning
- Scheduling and Team Management
- Team Training
1. Accurate Menu Translation
Whether you run a local café or a popular eatery, having translated menus available is key — especially if your restaurant is located in a touristic area. AI can help with accurate translation of your menu into multiple languages, ensuring your international guests understand your dishes without embarrassing misspellings or confusing terms. This can create a more welcoming environment for non-native speakers and open your business to a new audience. Imagine offering a perfectly translated menu in French, Spanish, or Mandarin, with just a few clicks. It’s especially useful for customers with specific dietary restrictions.
2. Brainstorming Creative Content
Avoid the writer’s block, facing a blank page without knowing how to get started. AI can act as a brainstorming partner to help you craft engaging content and reduce the time spent to get ideas and start writing your first draft. You’ll have to edit, clarify and adjust the content. The key to working well with AI for content is to be very specific with your instructions. Tell the AI who your audience is, what tone you want, and provide a detailed brief. For example, if you want to write about your signature plant-based dish, you can ask AI for ideas that resonate with health-conscious food lovers. This way, you’ll save time while ensuring your brand voice remains consistent. New AI tools can even draft an illustration. You can create poster for events, marketing campaigns, educational content etc
You will notice that while drawing illustrations, AI tools tend to mess-up with the texts, as shown in the illustration generated using ChatGPT for this article.
3. Recipe Adjustments for Allergies and Preferences
Most restaurants are still not offering well balanced and designed plant-based options. As a customer, you have to pick a vegetarian dish, get some ingredients removed and pay its full price. AI can help conventional chefs to offer true plant-based options based on their signature dishes by suggesting substitutions and variations. The chef simply has to experiment with these suggestions in the kitchen to adapt and adjust to their style.
As more and more customers are kindly requesting adjustments due to allergies, dietary restrictions, or personal preferences. AI can step in to suggest ingredient substitutions, ensuring that your dishes remain delicious while catering to these needs. You can ask AI to adjust a recipe for a gluten-free version or offer alternatives for customers with nut allergies.
Additionally, AI can help calculate the macros and calories in each dish, allowing you to simplify the creation of more health-conscious options for your clientele.
4. Pricing Tactics: Balancing Cost and Profit
I keep witnessing chefs struggling and wasting time to evaluate their food costs. AI can help evaluating food costs effortlessly. You can indicate the yield of your basic recipes, the portion size to accurately measure the food costs, the calories and macros.
From there AI can provide trends in pricing, benchmark prices in your area and help the restaurant manager to determine a price point for each dish. Still the manager gets the final say and has to adjust the prices accordingly to his constraints and strategy. It’s a tactical decision to keep some prices attractive on signature dishes and to make a bit more money on other items.
You can get suggestions on how to price dishes to ensure profitability while staying competitive. Imagine inputting your ingredients into an AI tool and getting a clear breakdown of how to price a new dish based on market data — this takes the guesswork out of pricing and helps you make more informed decisions.
5. Waste Control and Meal Planning
As chefs, minimising waste in the kitchen is a constant battle. AI can assist with meal planning based on the ingredients you already have in your kitchen. For instance, if you have a basket of seasonal vegetables, you can input these ingredients into an AI tool and receive suggestions for dishes to prepare throughout the week. This can help reduce waste, save money, and introduce more sustainable practices in your kitchen.
6. Scheduling and Team Management
Running a professional kitchen involves more than just cooking — you also need to manage a team. AI tools can help with scheduling by optimizing work hours, arranging shifts, and adjusting the schedule when team members call in sick. This ensures smoother operations, especially during busy periods.
7. Training on Nutritional Information
In an age where customers are increasingly health-conscious, having a staff well-versed in nutritional information is a huge plus. AI can be used to train your team on the nutritional content of dishes, helping them provide accurate information to customers. This can improve the overall customer experience, as guests appreciate knowledgeable staff who can answer their dietary questions confidently.
A Patient Helper and Friendly Assistant
For chefs, embracing AI doesn’t mean replacing hands-on time, human intuition or creativity — it means having an assistant that helps you work smarter, not harder.
AI can help drafting event posters, translating menus to adjusting recipes on the fly. The key is to approach AI as a tool that complements your unique style and expertise.
By freeing up chefs from time consuming tasks, AI allows them to focus their precious time, creativity and energy on what matters most, that is crafting signature dishes, caring about quality and leading the kitchen.
Chefs embracing emerging technologies early will find themselves ahead of the curve by becoming more resilient, efficient and sustainable.
This article was inspired by questions and a IG live conversation with Ivor and Laura on How-to leverage AI for Chefs. You can watch the recording.
