The MindChef project, developed by the Barcelona-based startup of the same name, has won our inaugural AI for SMBs Project Contest, which we organized a few months ago. This tool, led by Daniel Fontanet and Marc Pérez, has barely two years on the market—enough time to establish its significance and usefulness for small and medium-sized hospitality businesses.
As we described in our eBook, MindChef is an artificial intelligence software tool that helps independent restaurants control costs, optimize margins, and digitize their daily management in a simple and accessible way.
For about a month, our readers and a panel of expert judges have been analyzing the eight finalist projects and casting their votes among them. In the end, this Catalan tool was the one that convinced everyone the most. Here are some of the comments it received:
«MindChef seems to me a particularly powerful project due to its ability to apply AI to a very concrete and critical problem for thousands of small hospitality businesses: truly knowing their costs and margins and being able to make data-driven decisions. I especially like that the impact of the technology is easy to understand, measure, and translate directly into the profitability of the business».
«I consider it offers the most convincing proposal due to its direct impact on profitability and its ease of adoption for small businesses».
«Resuelve un problema crítico: vender mucho sin conocer el margen real. Su implantación estimada en 72 horas y el bajo nivel técnico requerido favorecen su uso en restaurantes independientes. Además, el caso presentado aporta resultados concretos: tareas reducidas de varias horas diarias a 15 minutos y una mejora aproximada del 30 % en el margen de un plato, suficiente para recuperar la inversión según el documento. Una aplicación de IA práctica, con retorno económico claro y vinculada a decisiones diarias del negocio».
A Case Study
MindChef worked with a family-run coastal restaurant specializing in Mediterranean cuisine and fresh fish. The business was run by a married couple: one had prior hospitality experience, and the other had joined the industry as a result of this project. Although the restaurant was full almost every day, at the end of their first fiscal year they discovered they had lost money.
They didn’t understand what had happened. They had typical staffing problems and believed that the volume of customers was enough to keep the business profitable. They came to us because they needed to understand where profitability was slipping away.
«The first thing we did was analyze their real costs. We detected significant variances in labor, but also a critical raw-material problem: they were buying certain products at prices well above the market norms.»
«From there we began working together on the dish cost breakdown, prioritizing the best-sellers. It was then that another problem appeared: many dishes didn’t have the margins they believed. They weren’t accounting for waste or real updates to the cost of purchase.»
With MindChef they could start automatically updating prices from delivery notes and review margins in real time. Additionally, tasks that previously took them several hours a day reviewing invoices, costs, and recipes are now completed in just 15 minutes.
«In one of their flagship dishes we found that they could maintain quality by using an equivalent product with lower waste and better cost. The result was an approximate 30% increase in that dish’s margin.» In fact, just by optimizing this dish they recovered the entire MindChef investment.
They continue to optimize the entire menu, but now they do it with real data, less operational burden, and much more capacity to make fast, profitable decisions.
The most important thing wasn’t just improving margins or recouping the investment in the tool. The real change was regaining calm and control over the business. They went from making decisions by intuition to truly understanding what was happening in their restaurant, which dishes were profitable, and where they were losing money.
