Burnt Launches: Agentic OS for Food Supply Chain
"AI agents for food distributors starts here. "
TL;DR:
Legacy ERPs may run the business for food distributors, but they come at a steep cost - manual order entry alone can consume 10-50 people’s time that should be spent on sales and customer service. Ripping these systems out would take years, cost millions, and probably spark a small mutiny. Meanwhile, flashy e-commerce storefronts have flopped harder than day-old soufflé.
Burnt deploys AI Agents directly inside these ERPs, starting with a Sales AI Agent that completely replaces the order management job function.
They are working with large distributors across meat, seafood, and specialty ingredients - 97% of their orders now run end-to-end without people & 90% of order-entry staff shifted into sales.
They are building supply chain superintelligence so that independent food distributors can compete with the US Foods and Sysco.
Founded by Joseph Jacob, Rhea Karimpanal & Chandru Shanumugasundaram
- JJ (Joseph Jacob), CEO - worked in every part of the food supply chain from farm to table; has bought over 400M lbs of shrimp in his career. Comes from a family with 85 years in the seafood industry.
- Rhea, CPO - grew up around restaurants, with a design eye that ensures their AI feels invisible yet impactful.
- Chandru, CTO - built a custom ERP for his dad’s factory as a teenager; obsessed with tech that solves messy, real-world operations.
They have been right there in the thick of it - on factory floors, in seafood markets, and out in the warehouses.
The Problem
Food distributors that supply restaurants rely on decades-old legacy ERPs - critical to operations but slow, inflexible, and dependent on armies of people to run.
Past attempts to automate these workflows have failed:
- RPA works only for structured PDFs, not for the messy reality of food orders coming via emails, calls, texts, WhatsApp, and fax.
- E-commerce storefronts have low adoption, 12-24 month implementation cycles and come at a high cost - both financially and emotionally - for distributors, while still failing to address the nuances of the industry.
This leaves distributors buried in manual work. Customer service teams are the perfect example of this issue - they spend most of their time re-typing orders instead of building relationships.
Their Solution
Burnt’s AI Agents operate inside existing ERPs - no rip-and-replace required.
Their first agent, Ozai, monitors all incoming sales channels (email, text, voicemail, WhatsApp, fax – even phone calls), learns each customer’s shorthand, habits, and favorite products, interprets prep notes, and enters the order directly into the ERP.
If something’s unclear, Ozai asks the customer for clarification and continues processing without breaking the workflow. The more it sees, the smarter it gets.
They are live with some of the most respected independent distributors in the business, who’ve used their AI to double down on customer relationships instead of data entry - all in just a matter of weeks.
Vision
They are not just automating order entry anymore - their customers are turning to Burnt, eager for them to take on tasks like automated credit control & procurement.
Their mission? They are building towards a plug-and-play OS that predicts and executes business decisions before humans need to act.
Learn More
🌐 Visit www.getburnt.ai to learn more.
👣 Follow Burnt on LinkedIn & X.
Simplify Startup Finances Today
Take the stress out of bookkeeping, taxes, and tax credits with Fondo’s all-in-one accounting platform built for startups. Start saving time and money with our expert-backed solutions.
Get Started