Choco automates food distribution with AI agents

Rebuilding food distribution for the AI era

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.

“Processing those inputs was the first barrier, but not the hardest one. The real problem was implicit context: customer-specific SKU mappings, unit preferences, delivery patterns. That knowledge lived in the heads of order desk reps, and we needed to encode it into inference layers that resolve ambiguity at the point of order capture."

—Narbeh Mirzaei, VP Engineering

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.

Inside the rollout

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.

“The transcription and extraction capabilities gave us a strong foundation. The real engineering challenge was building dynamic in-context learning infrastructure, so the system resolves ambiguity against each customer's ordering history and catalog. That’s what separates automation from intelligence.”

—Narbeh Mirzaei, VP Engineering

—Daniel Khachab, Co-Founder & CEO