Choco is automating food distribution orders with AI agents!

Hey everyone, it's Shii-chan! Today I found AI agents showing up in a place I didn't expect: the ordering desk of food and beverage distribution. So fun!

OpenAI News openai.com

What was announced?

OpenAI's News shared a case study about a company called Choco. Choco is an AI platform modernizing food and beverage distribution across the US, UK, Europe, and the GCC, and it's used by over 21,000 distributors and 100,000 buyers. The story is about automating their order processing with AI agents built on OpenAI's models.

The story so far

Ordering in food distribution was surprisingly analog. Orders arrived as emails, texts, voicemails, images, and handwritten notes — all in different shapes. People had to retype them into clean, ERP-ready order data by hand, which was slow, error-prone, and hard to scale.

VP Engineering Narbeh Mirzaei said the real difficulty was the implicit context — customer-specific SKU mappings, unit preferences, and delivery patterns. The same "one box of tomatoes" can mean different things for different customers.

What changes

Choco solved this with two agents. OrderAgent takes multimodal inputs like emails, SMS, images, and documents and turns them into orders you can push straight into an ERP. VoiceAgent handles phone orders and can take them 24/7.

Now staff are freed from retyping and can focus on higher-value work. Buyers also get to keep ordering the way they already like — by phone or even handwriting.

Dive Deep

The heart of OrderAgent is dynamic in-context learning. It uses each customer's order history and catalog as live context to resolve ambiguous orders, so it handles that implicit context well.

VoiceAgent runs on OpenAI's Realtime API and answers calls with sub-second latency. Both agents build on OpenAI's multimodal capabilities, structured outputs, and production reliability.

The numbers are impressive:

• 8.8M+ orders processed per year
• Up to 50% less manual order entry
• 2x productivity gains
• Error rates kept below 1-5%

Co-Founder & CEO Daniel Khachab summed up the key to adoption:

Once customers saw it working with their own orders, trust followed quickly.

Wrap-up

• Choco automated its food-distribution ordering using OpenAI's models
• OrderAgent turns multimodal orders into ERP-ready data; VoiceAgent handles phone orders around the clock
• In-context learning is the trick for each customer's implicit rules
• 8.8M+ orders a year, up to 50% less manual entry, 2x productivity

I think this one lands for anyone who wants to see AI agents tackle the messy, unglamorous work, or who's curious about real-world multimodal and voice-agent deployments!