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Menu AI

AI-powered menu management for restaurants. From photo to formatted, priced menu in minutes — OCR, Claude API, and a real-time pricing engine under the hood.

Role Founder & Lead Engineer
Type B2B SaaS
Stack Python, FastAPI, Claude API
Status Live

Three systems, one pipeline

OCR Pipeline

Extracts text from menu photos and PDFs. Handles handwritten menus, multi-column layouts, and non-English text.

AI Engine

Claude API structures raw OCR output into categorized menu items with descriptions, allergens, and modifiers.

Pricing System

Real-time tiered pricing engine. Calculates costs per menu based on complexity, item count, and subscription tier.

What it's built with

Python + FastAPI BACKEND
Claude API (Anthropic) AI
Tesseract + Vision API OCR
PostgreSQL DATABASE
Jinja2 + HTMX FRONTEND
Stripe PAYMENTS

Problems worth solving

Messy input, clean output

Restaurant menus arrive as photos, PDFs, and handwritten notes. The OCR pipeline normalizes all of it into structured data before the AI layer touches it.

Magic Edit Chat

Natural language menu editing. Users say "add a gluten-free section" and the system restructures the entire menu intelligently — not just appending text.

Multi-tenant pricing

POS dealers manage hundreds of restaurants. The pricing engine handles per-restaurant billing, dealer margins, and volume discounts in real time.