How restaurants are using tech to serve customised food

Large volumes of data rule cyberworld today. There are terrabytes of text, photos and videos by way of tweets, updates from networking sites, blogs, websites etc. Everyone is trying their best to decipher this huge amount of information. At this year's IBM PartnerWorld Conference here, the focus was on making sense of this humongous volume of data.

The Cheesecake Factory was the poster boy at the event. This huge food chain, which has over 175 restaurants in the US and three in West Asia, uses IBM's Big Data analytics to provide quality service to customers. As each restaurant makes around 200 dishes and the outlet serves more than 80 million people annually, data analytics is critical for the chain.

The information ranges from moving food at the appropriate temperature to making sure that fresh food is available to ensuring that products on sale are within the expiration date.

Angela Nardone, chairman and chief innovation officer of N2N Global, an IBM Partner, said, "The Cheesecake Factory has been making use of the IBM solution to pass on critical information to a large number of restaurants , like getting rid of ingredients that don't conform to high standards of quality and consistency or removing an item that has been withdrawn."

Donald Moore, chief culinary officer for The Cheesecake Factory , said that their ultimate goal was to deliver the best dining experience . "It is critical that we have the tools to ensure a fantastic dining experience for our guests in every restaurant from Beverly Hills to Kuwait City," he said.

If an ingredient does not meet the required standard on taste, colour or consistency, then it is conveyed immediately, instead of manually inputting and accessing the information, thereby saving time and scaling up efficiency.

At the conference, IBM launched a number of technologies to help partners turn mounds of data to actionable insights . For example, partners will get one-year free access to cloud-based IBM Digital Analytics to identify patterns in customer preference and turn real-time marketing strategies to satisfy customers better.

Another is the 'Ready for IBM MobileFirst' initiative. In healthcare ,it makes vital parameters of a patient available via mobile devices to experts to facilitate quicker and more accurate diagnosis. In banking, customers can make financial transactions and even deposit cheques via mobile phones.

(This correspondent was in Las Vegas at the invitation of IBM)