Walt O. Staehle’s research while affiliated with Kraft Foods and other places

... Moreover as Bozkir and Akcapinar Sezer point out, approaches which forecast the demand for a served menu can present many benefits to institutions as it would optimize the balance of supply and demand in name of saving resources and work power [1]. At this point, Sundararajan et al. address the importance of information technology and services, computer aided tools providing intelligence to make real time decisions [3]. With this motivation, Sundararajan et al. implemented a decision support system for making operational decisions in food processing industry which is based on optimization techniques and focuses on determining optimum production scenario for every week based on the tradeoffs between service levels, inventories, costs and capacity [3]. ...

Reference:

ADEM: An Online Decision Tree Based Menu Demand Prediction Tool for Food Courts