GrubMarket, a B2B marketplace for food service distribution, is making artificial intelligence (AI) an even bigger priority.

GrubMarket acquired Butter on May 23 for an undisclosed price to serve GrubMarket’s growing appetite for artificial intelligence (AI) applications. The marketplace hopes AI solutions will be able to facilitate faster ecommerce and digital payment processing for small restaurants and neighborhood grocers.

San Francisco-based Butter is a four-year-old company. Its software product suite for food distribution companies includes:

• AI-powered sales tools
• Cloud-based enterprise resource planning
• Integrated online payment solutions

To date, Butter has raised more than $39 million in funding with a business base that includes more than 11,000 buyers. It also processes hundreds of thousands of orders annually, the company says.

Next steps in GrubMarket AI growth

Now, GrubMarket is rolling out its latest AI initiative: AI Orders, an AI-powered, automated order processing for food wholesalers and distributors who receive orders from their customers.

Many food wholesalers and distributors struggle with the manual, inefficient, and time-consuming process of taking customer orders, GrubMarket says.

And these businesses process a high volume of orders that arrive via traditional channels like phone, text message, and email. Each has complex line items expressed in vague and non-standardized language.

“The process of converting these artifacts into orders in the distributor’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is invariably error-prone, labor-intensive, and tedious, often leading to costly errors and fulfillment delays, negatively impacting both customer satisfaction and revenue generation potential,” GrubMarket says.

AI Orders addresses these challenges by using AI to convert emails, text messages, and voicemails into integrated digital orders, enhancing operational efficiency and streamlining how food businesses manage their order flow.

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