Introducing the Choco Voice Agent, built by Choco in collaboration with OpenAI
Food distribution is one of the most essential industries in the world, yet it remains one of the least digitized. Every night, thousands of restaurants and operators finish service and pick up the phone to place orders for the next morning. These calls often arrive after hours, land on voicemail machines, and wait until a distributor can staff a team the next day. By that time, stock may have changed, products may be missing, and both sides lose precious hours resolving issues that could have been avoided.
Although the entire supply chain depends on speed and accuracy, the operational reality has not changed much in decades. Distributors still rely heavily on manual entry, late night work, and processes that are increasingly difficult to maintain.
At Choco, our mission is to modernize this workflow and help distributors run more efficiently, more profitably and with less waste. Over the past years, our AI technology has already automated thousands of orders and significantly reduced manual work for teams across Europe and the United States. Today, we are taking a significant step forward.
Introducing the Choco Voice Agent
The Choco Voice Agent is a new real time conversational AI that allows restaurants to place orders by phone at any time and in any language. It can take an order, check availability, propose alternatives when products are out of stock, highlight promotions on items nearing expiry, and send a clean structured order directly into the distributor’s ERP system.
It has been developed by Choco in collaboration with OpenAI, using OpenAI’s Realtime API. This allows the Voice Agent to understand natural conversation, respond immediately and support multilingual operators with very low latency. For restaurants, nothing changes. They call the same number they always use and speak as they always do. The experience becomes faster and more reliable.
For distributors, the Voice Agent removes one of the industry’s most persistent pain points. Night shifts used to be a standard part of the business but they have become nearly impossible to staff. Many distributors now rely on voicemail machines, which do not provide feedback to restaurants and lead to frequent errors, misunderstandings and unnecessary waste. The Choco Voice Agent offers a way to support these after hours orders without compromising accuracy or service quality.
Why voice matters now
Distributors across regions share the same operational challenge. Turnover is high. Training costs are rising. Night work is increasingly difficult to fill. And voicemail based processes strain both teams and margins. At the same time, restaurants expect immediate confirmation and dependable communication. The gap between what the market needs and what traditional workflows can deliver has never been wider.
Real time voice AI is now capable of filling this gap. The Voice Agent is not an experiment or a consumer feature adapted for business. It is built for the operational reality of food distribution, where speed, accuracy and reliability are non negotiable. It supports the repetitive work that is difficult to staff and allows human teams to concentrate on customer relationships and daytime operations where they add the most value.
“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 do not give restaurants the feedback they need. Together with OpenAI, we are changing that. The Choco Voice Agent replaces those night shifts with real time conversations that confirm stock, suggest alternatives, and reduce food waste. It is technology that adapts to people, not the other way around.”
Built on OpenAI’s platform, designed by Choco for food distribution
The Voice Agent combines Choco’s deep experience in food supply operations with OpenAI’s latest voice models. OpenAI provides the underlying real time technology and the Realtime API. Choco designed the product experience, the workflow logic, the ERP integration and the operational guardrails that make it fit the needs of distributors.
This approach reflects how companies in Europe are increasingly using AI infrastructure to solve concrete business challenges. OpenAI’s platform provides the performance, data protection and EU aligned controls required for enterprise use. Choco brings the domain expertise and the product design that make the technology work in a sector that still handles large volumes of orders through phone conversations.
“OpenAI’s mission is to empower innovators like Choco to apply cutting edge AI in ways that deliver real impact,” said Niklas Harzheim, Director of Technology and Digital Industries at OpenAI. “Choco deeply understands the challenges in the food sector, from operational inefficiencies to the global issue of food waste, and is using our models to build solutions that make a tangible difference. Together, we are showing how frontier AI can help reduce waste, cut costs and improve productivity for suppliers and restaurants worldwide.”
What distributors are seeing so far
Our previous AI Order Agent has already demonstrated measurable results. Distributors using it consistently reach 90 to 97 percent order accuracy within two to three weeks, save more than fifteen labor hours per week and reduce manual work per order by roughly seventy percent.
Early controlled deployments of the Voice Agent show similar progress. In tests, it achieved about twenty six percent more upsell than the average night shift workflow because it can consistently surface relevant promotions and check stock in real time. These early outcomes confirm that real time voice can meaningfully reduce errors, improve throughput and help distributors manage their inventory more efficiently.
Looking ahead
The Choco Voice Agent is an important milestone in our broader plan to build the AI layer for food distribution. Phone orders still represent a significant share of the market in many countries. Introducing real time voice is a natural extension of the work we have already done with AI based ordering and data automation.
In the coming years, the same underlying intelligence will support forecasting, automated follow ups, demand based recommendations, anomaly detection and decision support for sales teams. Our goal is to help distributors run with more predictability, less waste and better service, while keeping human teams focused on the relationships that make this industry unique.
Food distribution is essential, complex and time sensitive. By bringing real time AI into its daily workflows, we believe the industry can become more resilient and more efficient, without forcing operators to change the way they work.
The Choco Voice Agent is the first visible result of this direction. Much more is coming.