US Foods Holding Corp. has introduced an artificial intelligence–based tool aimed at helping restaurant operators understand which menu items make money — and which do not — as food costs and pricing pressures remain elevated across the industry.
The tool, called Menu IQ, is integrated into US Foods’ MOXē digital platform and is being offered at no additional cost to customers, the company said Sunday. It is designed to provide real-time, item-level insight into menu profitability by combining recipe data with current food costs drawn from US Foods’ inventory and pricing systems.
Menu IQ allows operators to upload recipes and automatically calculate food costs, track margins by dish and flag underperforming menu items. The goal, the company said, is to move menu decisions away from intuition and toward continuous, data-driven analysis.
“Menu profitability sits at the top of our operators’ concerns,” said James Jones, senior vice president of digital commerce at US Foods. He said the tool is intended to help customers quickly identify margin drivers and adjust based on real-time cost data.
The launch adds a menu-focused analytics layer to MOXē, US Foods’ broader digital platform that already supports product ordering, inventory management, and order tracking. Unlike traditional procurement tools, Menu IQ is aimed squarely at the economics of what restaurants sell, rather than what they buy.
US Foods did not disclose adoption expectations or quantify the potential financial impact of the product. The company framed the launch as part of a broader effort to deepen its role as a technology and data partner to restaurant operators, not just a distributor.
US Foods serves 250,000 customer locations nationwide and operates more than 70 broadline distribution centers along with more than 90 cash-and-carry locations. The company is headquartered in Rosemont, Illinois.
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