Chicken Wings, AI and Gaining an Edge in the Restaurant Business

Running a chicken wing restaurant is not rocket science.

But it’s more complicated than one might think.

If, say, you’re managing supplies for hundreds of chicken wing franchises nationally, analyzing income against expenditures requires the parsing of many thousands of factors, variables and scenarios. Consider: wings are bought by the pound and sold by the piece, so cost by the pound must be tracked against sales by the piece. While that’s fairly straightforward, the problem is that chickens bred in the South are larger than those bred in the Northeast, so the calculation of income against expenditure must be adjusted on a regional basis. Then there’s the matter of serving sizes – three, five or seven pieces, for example, with a discount applied to larger portions. Here, you need to track consumption patterns and their impact on profit margins. And don’t forget about managing inventories of six or seven varieties of sauces and monitoring which ones move and which…