Choco and OpenAI join forces to launch the first AI Voice Agent for the food service industry
A collaboration that brings real-time AI to one of the world's least digitized sectors
BERLIN, Dec. 4, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Choco, the world's leading food service technology company, today announced a collaboration with OpenAI to launch the Choco Voice Agent, an AI solution that transforms how restaurants and distributors communicate and operate.
Built on OpenAI's Realtime API, the Choco Voice Agent can receive calls, take orders, answer product questions, and recommend additional items based on the customer's needs - in any language, 24/7.
The product directly tackles one of the industry's biggest challenges: the growing inability to staff night shifts. Across regions, food distributors struggle to find employees willing to manually type orders that arrive after hours. High turnover, retraining costs, and reliance on outdated answering machines have made this process inefficient and unsustainable. Restaurants often receive no immediate feedback, leading to missed items, wasted stock, and costly callbacks the next day.
The Choco Voice Agent replaces these manual processes with real-time, AI-driven conversations. The agent can confirm stock availability, propose alternatives when products are missing, and highlight promotions on items nearing expiration which helps distributors to increase sales, reduce costs and food waste.
By integrating OpenAI's voice models into Choco's platform, the Voice Agent automates repetitive tasks, eliminates order errors, and gives distributors more time to focus on service and growth. Through Choco's AI technology, order accuracy has increased to 95%, manual processing time has been cut by 50%, and reduced waste - and the Voice Agent will take these efficiencies even further.
"Distributors are facing challenges that slow down their growth — they can't find people willing to take orders by night anymore," said Daniel Khachab, Co-Founder and CEO of Choco. "Turnover is high, the work is repetitive, and answering machines don't give restaurants the feedback they need. Together with OpenAI, we're changing that. The Choco Voice Agent replaces those night shifts with real-time conversations that confirm stock, suggest alternatives, and help reduce food waste. It's technology that adapts to people — not the other way around."
The collaboration combines Choco's deep expertise in food supply operations with OpenAI's real-time AI capabilities, driving efficiency, sustainability, and innovation across Europe and beyond.
"OpenAI's mission is to empower innovators like Choco to apply cutting-edge AI in ways that deliver real impact," said Niklas Harzheim, Director, Technology & Digital Industries at OpenAI. "Choco deeply understands the challenges in the food sector — from inefficiencies in supply chains to the global issue of food waste — and is using OpenAI's models to build solutions that make a tangible difference. Together, we're showing how frontier AI can help reduce waste, cut costs, and boost productivity for thousands of suppliers and restaurants worldwide."
About Choco: Choco is a leading AI-powered platform transforming how restaurants and distributors connect and operate. Founded in 2018 by Daniel Khachab and Julian Hammer, Choco is the only AI platform built for food and beverage distributors that captures every order automatically, drives revenue growth, gets them paid faster, and helps reduce food waste across the global food supply chain. With over $328 million raised, Choco became the first unicorn in food distribution technology. Today, it supports over 110,000 businesses across the U.S., France, Germany, Spain, the U.K., and the UAE.
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SOURCE Choco