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Chick-fil-A deploys AI to fight food safety threats in US

May 28, 2019

A key Chick-fil-A executive said the company is using AI to fight the threat of food safety problems across its 2,400 restaurants in 47 states. Venture Beat, a technology news site, said Davis  Addy, principal IT leader of food safety and product quality told the  ReWork Deep Learning Summit in Boston last week that the chain was using algorithms to flag health issues in its restaurants using social media posts from customers.

Addy said social media is, in fact, the most common customer feedback channel for food safety-related incidents, though posts are tough for any form of automated intelligence to viably sift through and make sense of. That's why the brand sought to create a framework identify keywords, phrases and customer sentiment that might help the brand spot emerging emerging foodborne illness. 

Social platforms are reviewed through AI every 10 minutes, then filtered and reviewed for legitimacy. The chain also worked with Amazon Web Services to improve the process, which now is yielding a 78% accuracy, according to Venture Beat. 

Data goes to store managers who are enabled to directly contact customers if needed, while information is also sent to a corporate  dashboard for plotting to spot trends. At the time of this writing, Chick-fil-A had not responded to QSRweb's request for additional details about the system.