When a beloved chain restaurant has a hot new sandwich that gets everyone talking, you probably have someone like Ian Ramirez to thank. A chef, culinary consultant, and co-founder of Mad Honey Culinary Studio and Goods, he’s the guy that brands hire to get their product on the menu, and make it look and taste good—whether it’s a sauce, syrup, spread, or spice.
Ian has spent his career finding innovative ways to make mouth-watering meals for clients—and one of his latest ingredients is artificial intelligence. Ian uses AI to tackle the repetitive, time-consuming parts of menu planning for commercial kitchens and help clients visualize new concepts before anything gets sliced or diced. It’s a tool that augments his creativity, he says, and makes prep less of a grind.
On season two of the Dropbox podcast Working Smarter, Ian talks about how AI is helping him and his team spend more time doing what they love: cooking and getting creative in the kitchen.
You can read an excerpt of our conversation with Ian below.
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What’s your most memorable example of someone giving you a product or an ingredient, and then you have to make a recipe or a dish using it?
We did some things with Kikkoman at one of their conferences called Worlds of Flavor. The whole conference was all about fusion. I have a Mexican background with my culinary experiences and my food. So I did a play on takoyaki—but instead it was tacoyaki. Instead of octopus we actually did some braised pork cheek and some pineapple that we compressed with Kikkoman teriyaki glaze. Oh, and the batter was half masa, to give it that taco flavor.
That sounds so tasty. Do you think AI could ever come up with something that inventive?
You know, I actually feel like… maybe. Technology augments human potential, and working together you can create magic.
I've seen you describe the importance of human intelligence when using AI in the kitchen—of being able to balance AI with human creativity. As a chef, why is that so important?
The creative extent of what AI can do is kind of limitless. At the same time, you know your customers better than AI does—what's going to sell and what's not. If you're from the Midwest, everybody just wants ranch dressing, you know? It doesn't have to be totally wild and crazy all the time. There's a balance between using AI as a tool, but not completely relying on it for everything.
Dropbox Dash: Find anything. Protect everything.Your first AI project is a good example of that. You used it to help plan these five week menu cycles for college campuses. That’s thousands of different menu items you previously had to come up with, which could take your team at the time the whole summer. What was the goal there?
I was trying to figure out a way to take a task that would take hours, weeks, possibly even months to figure out and have AI give you a roadmap to jump off from within a couple hours. It saved so much time. And what that did for me, as Director of Culinary for this organization, was it allowed the chefs to just be in the kitchen more instead of being in an office or boardroom with Post-Its for weeks at a time. Like, this allows them to actually be doing what they're good at—to cook good food, to be hands-on, to be training fellow chefs and cooks. To me, if this type of thing can save you that much time, it's such a huge win.
What I also realized is that you're not really stifling creativity by having AI platforms help you develop these five week menu cycles—because a lot of the ideas that you might get from this are stuff that you wouldn't have had on your menu cycle [to begin with]. And a lot of times, it can even be inspiring. There's nothing less inspiring than being stuck in a boardroom for two months trying to figure these menus out.
When you’re pitching a new dish to a brand or a restaurant chain, how does AI help you get them on board?
Sometimes what you're visualizing and what the client visualizes are two totally different things. Before you’d have to be like, okay, we're actually gonna make these—we're gonna go shopping for the food, hire a photographer, get a food stylist—so they can actually see it. It can take a lot of time and money. But what we've found with using AI is that you can kind of overcome some of those hurdles a little quicker. You can use image generation tools to get in that ballpark of “this is what we're thinking this is going to look like.” It might not even sound good on paper, but people eat with their eyes. So to have a really good visual representation of what that final product's probably going to look like is super helpful.
Even though you’re using AI to get to the concept stage quicker, photographers and food stylists are still an important part of your process once you get that sign-off on a dish. How come?
I think that you still want to have that realistic, tangible photograph using the correct products—so when they actually put it into action, it's accurate, and the chef knows what to do and what it should look like. Anybody can generate beautiful imagery using AI platforms, but not everybody has the knowledge, skill, talent, and experience to be able to physically do it in real life and make food that’s visually appealing and tastes really good.
Is that where the balance between human intelligence and artificial intelligence comes into play?
Yeah, absolutely. Because the human part also comes when you're tasting it, right? You might have that recipe 90% there, but that extra 10% could make or break it. So when you're actually making it, you're realizing, like, “Oh yeah, this could use this, or it could use that.” And that's when chefs can pull from that rolodex of flavor memories and just say, “This is what would go really good with this to take it that extra 10%.”
How else do you see chefs using AI going forward?
I would say the application in the kitchen is when you're creating efficiencies—trying to find trends, ingredients, maybe quickly ideating specials. I’ve seen people that can just take a list of ingredients that they have in the walk-in—maybe they have some fish they have to use—and they're like, “Man, we’ve got to figure this out, we open in like an hour. Here's some ingredients that we have on hand. Let's come up with something really quick.” And now you can throw it into ChatGPT or whatever platform and see if you can come up with a couple of different jumping-off points. It can narrow the focus to what you really need.
This interview has been edited and condensed. For more interviews and past episodes, visit workingsmarter.ai
The Author
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