There’s plenty to talk about in New York right now, from the recent Knicks’ NBA Championship win, to the ongoing infusion of World Cup fans, to Taylor Swift’s upcoming nuptials. But at one of the world’s biggest food trade shows earlier this week - the Summer Fancy Food Show held at New York’s Jacob K. Javit’s Convention Center - many of the 2,529 food brands who attended wanted to talk about one thing: how they are using AI to compete with bigger brands. Newer and smaller founders hawking beef jerky, pita chips and hydration beverages credited AI for fueling their growth and getting them into the same show as bigger brands like Stonewall Kitchen and Bonne Maman.

It’s about time for an industry that is notoriously behind when it comes to technology. For years, I’ve reported on food companies that still rely heavily on faxes to give and receive orders and pay bills by checks. I have also written for Forbes about how food brands have benefited from the most basic AI. It’s a sentiment that Spencer Oberg , CEO of the plant forward Italian frozen food brand called Sunday Suppers who flew into the show from Seattle, agreed with.

“It’s still a very archaic industry,” said Oberg. “A lot of the backend stuff in food and beverage is suited to AI.”

It wasn’t simply that younger founders embraced AI and older founders did not. Two twenty-something founders perched before a sign that read “We quit our jobs on Wall Street to start this business” said they weren’t using AI. But Sonal Khakar , a nutritionist, mom and founder of the power bowl business Aahana’s has made AI her “new Netflix” and spends every spare moment she has using it to build her one-person enterprise. It’s helped her get her bowls distributed to natural food stores nationwide and in academic institutions and hospitals throughout the Boston area.

In fact, more experienced founders often seemed to appreciate AI even more. Heather Howell , CEO of the female hydration brand Greater Than, previously worked as global director of innovation and trademark for the Jack Daniel’s family of brands. She knows her more established rivals have far more resources, like marketing and finance teams with massive budgets. So she has been embracing AI and treating Claude like her “sixth employee” to fill in her company’s gaps. She walked around the Fancy Food show wearing a t-shirt that read “Drink Your Snack” on the back. It’s a catchphrase that AI helped her create and that she then trademarked. She also used AI to create an entire orientation and training program for new employees that resembled what her former employer offered. She also uses it to gather research about the market and her competitors.

“It gives me the data that I could never afford to get because we don’t have those budgets,” said Howell. “We don’t have a multi-million dollar budget.”

Founders of food brands could not stop talking about all of the ways they use AI. But here are some of the most innovative ways that seem to resonate to all businesses.

  1. Scheduling meetings with prospective buyers: Many founders of food companies complained about how challenging it is to try to book an open time to pitch their product to a retailer and then miss the window. So Khakar uses AI to set up reminders when she needs to pitch her bowls again to a potential store like Whole Foods. Khakar then embeds these reminders into her personal calendar and asks AI to organize her pitch schedule around the rest of her life. For example, she said if she wanted to pitch two different Whole Foods stores in a day, “It will suggest, ‘You can go to the Whole Foods A and Whole Foods B. Your driving distance will be 10 minutes. You can pick up a 10-2pm demo and a 3-7pm demo and you can rest for 10 minutes and drive for 15 minutes. You need to start at this time from home and if you have any evening engagements like I have a dinner or something, you may get time to come home and dress up or you need to take something to change.”
  2. Creating a business team: While Khakar does not call them agents, she creates folders in Gemini with specific job titles like vp of marketing, vp of sales and vp of operations. She then prompts these folders by writing "You are my VP of marketing. Tell me, I have to present to Sprouts.’" She then shares her presentation with Gemini, asks for feedback and asks Gemini to help her create a one-page document or a two minute presentation.
  3. Discovering where your customers are really coming from: Sabeen Hasan, cofounder of Chikka Chikka fennel seed digestive snacks, said that the two-person company she runs with her husband has used Claude to analyze their Shopify lists. That has given them more information about their clients than she could have imagined. At first glance, they thought that their clients were South Asian. But when they dug more into their data, they learned that their repeat customers were second and third generation South Asian customers. The data that they gathered also showed that they were attracting far more customers who were using their products as a natural antacid for conditions like GERT and irritable bowel syndrome. “AI has helped us analyze feedback from our diverse customer base and identify which use cases resonate most,” said Hasan.
  4. Battling other tech. Lucas Prado , Co-Founder of BEEST Snacks, which makes products like beef jerky chips, had been struggling for months because he was not able to connect his Instagram and Facebook business accounts for his products. That meant he couldn’t show customers what his product looked like. After spending nearly a year trying to get Meta customer support to help him resolve the problem, he scheduled an agent to reach out to Meta hourly until he could get a real human on Meta’s technical team to fix it. “It fired 37 times in a row and I finally got through to someone who could help!” wrote Prado. “From there, it was a call, some verifications and it was fixed.”
  5. Targeting the press you want to talk to: While many founders still vet all of the emails that they use AI to help draft, Prado used an AI agent to draft and send emails to more than 400 journalists the Speciality Food Association offered to connect him with over the three-day show. Prado stresses that he makes sure they are well curated emails. He found this has had “great results, and you were one of them!”