CuliNexus
The Digital Backbone of small-and-medium enterprises (SME) Kitchens
A smart culinary platform developed to bridge the gap between back-of-house operations and procurement.
Revolutionizing kitchen operations and empowering culinary teams, one automated workflow at a time.
Problem
Currently, SME kitchen staff and procurement officers rely on disjointed manual processes, such as messy Excel spreadsheets or messaging applications to handle operations, such as tracking stock.
This frequently results in problems such as missing inventory data that can lead to critical stock-outs of essential ingredients like sugar or chocolate mix.
Unfortunately, professional enterprise solutions are often priced prohibitively, costing upwards of $72,000 per year.
Key Pain Points Identified
Inventory Inaccuracy
Discrepancies between physical stock and digital records lead to unexpected shortages.
Fragmented Communication
Information is scattered across unorganized chat groups and inconsistent spreadsheets.
High Barrier to Entry
Existing ERP solutions are too complex and expensive for small-to-medium culinary enterprises.
Manual Data Entry Fatigue
Inconsistent naming conventions make data interpretation slow and error-prone.
Problem Statement
Our Solution
CuliNexus
Culinexus is a modular Software-As-A-Service platform with enhanced features like AI-powered Inventory LLM and Automated SKU Unification, ensuring your kitchen never runs out of essentials.
With CuliNexus, kitchen staff can now update inventory through a simple chatbot command, which automatically triggers "Low Stock" alerts company-wide. Furthermore, procurement officers no longer have to chase manual updates; they can now approve reorders with a single click thanks to the seamless synchronization between the kitchen and the admin console.
Features
Raw Material List
A central, comprehensive database containing detailed records
of all raw materials a company purchases, stores, and uses in production
Products
Specify the materials that you would use
Inventory
Besides providing quick actionable information, the “sync with RMM” features
ensures data is properly synced between the Inventory and the RMM
Recipes
Recipes store the details such as the materials used to create your products.
Audit
For administrative oversight, the system maintains a comprehensive audit trail,
ensures accountability and data reliability across the organisation.
CuliNexus Copilot
The Main Console provides a high-level summary of business health, showing the Total PO Value and Active Alerts alongside Vendor Performance metrics. Other relevant information, such as the Raw Material Master (RMM) list, Recent Purchase Orders, and Inventory Stock Levels, can be accessed directly from the sidebar for immediate action.
Self-correcting onboarding
CuliNexus automatically cleans, corrects, and categorizes legacy inventory data during the upload process, allowing organizations to migrate messy sheets into a structured database in seconds.
Interactive Copilot module
Interact with your inventory using natural language. Whether you’re checking current stock levels or identifying operational bottlenecks, the AI-driven query layer can answer your queries and even fulfill certain requests.
Action Guardrails
The CuliNexus Copilot also acts as a specialized procurement assistant, instantly verifying reorder amounts against current stock data so you can approve purchases with total confidence.
System Architecture
The architecture routes client traffic through Amazon Route 53 and an internet-facing Application Load Balancer which distributes requests across multiple Availability Zones.
Authentication and access are handled through Amazon Cognito while Amazon CloudFront keeps the frontend responsive by accelerating the delivery of static content stored in Amazon S3.
The application itself runs using Amazon ECS on EC2 compute, with AWS Lambda prepopulating tokens to reduce costs by preventing unnecessary database calls. All organizational data is managed in Amazon RDS.
Testing Results
4.25/5 stars
"Uploading the spreadsheets were quite straightforward. The interface is quite convenient to check for our errors so we started using the system fast."
10-60 minutes saved
The range of time saved with CuliNexus scales also depends on other factors such as user proficiency, data integrity, and total onboarding volume.
Video Showcase
Take a look at CuliNexus in action!
Poster
Acknowlegements
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We would like to express our sincere appreciation to Prof Marie Siew for her dedicated mentorship throughout our Capstone project. Her weekly guidance, thoughtful critiques, and ability to identify blind spots significantly strengthened the clarity, depth, and rigour of our work. Her support was instrumental in shaping both our approach and the quality of our final deliverables.
We also extend our gratitude to Prof Susan, whose expertise in communication enhanced our ability to present complex ideas clearly and effectively. Her guidance in writing, speaking, slide design, and articulation helped us build a solid foundation in professional communication, skills that were essential not only for this project but will continue to benefit us in future endeavours.
Our deepest appreciation goes to Jean Paul, our business mentor, for his practical insights into the F&B sector and his invaluable guidance on business framing, project scoping, and entrepreneurial thinking. His industry perspective challenged us to think beyond technical execution and to design a solution aligned with operational needs.
Finally, we would like to thank the VIE and Capstone Office for their consistent administrative, logistical, and operational support. From managing funding requests to coordinating project resources and parcel deliveries, their responsiveness ensured that our project ran smoothly from start to finish.
