Choco automates food distribution with AI agents
Choco uses OpenAI APIs to automate food distribution, processing orders from emails, texts, voicemails, images, and handwritten notes via AI agents. The platform introduced OrderAgent for multimodal input conversion and VoiceAgent for phone ordering with sub‑second latency. Implementation achieved up to 50% reduction in manual entry and supports 8.8 million orders annually.
The Core Development
Choco (opens in a new window) is an AI-powered platform modernizing food and beverage distribution, serving over 21,000 distributors and 100,000 buyers across the US, UK, Europe, and the GCC. By connecting restaurants, suppliers, and distributors into a unified system, Choco streamlines ordering, sales, and customer management across the food supply chain.
As order volumes grew, Choco hit a major bottleneck: orders still arrived through emails, texts, voicemails, images, and even handwritten notes. Teams manually translated those inputs into structured ERP orders—a slow, error-prone process that limited scale and created constant operational friction.
With the emergence of production-ready LLMs, Choco saw an opportunity to move beyond workflow software and build AI systems capable of executing work directly. OpenAI APIs became central to that transformation.
Real-World Use Cases & Applications
Adoption was driven by seamless integration across the entire ordering workflow. Customers didn’t need to change how they ordered—whether by phone, text, or email, the system adapted to them.
Looking ahead, Choco plans to further scale its use of OpenAI APIs to power more autonomous, context-aware systems across sales, commerce, and supply chain operations—continuing its shift from workflow software to AI-powered execution infrastructure.
Strategic Perspective & Ecosystem Impact
Choco embedded OpenAI APIs at the core of its platform to power a new generation of AI-native products. The company introduced OrderAgent (opens in a new window) , which processes multimodal inputs—including emails, SMS, images, and documents—and converts them into structured, ERP-ready orders.
Choco has also built VoiceAgent (opens in a new window) , powered by OpenAI’s Realtime API, enabling customers to place orders naturally over the phone with sub-second latency—even outside business hours.
OpenAI was selected for its model performance, multimodal capabilities, structured outputs, and production reliability at scale. The ability to handle text, vision, and audio within a single ecosystem allowed Choco to unify previously disconnected workflows into one intelligent system.
Why it matters
It shows large language models can replace manual supply‑chain workflows, boosting productivity and scaling without extra staff. The case highlights the shift from deterministic software to probabilistic AI execution.