Ready to (Tummy) Rumble: How whiteGREY and Red Rooster Detected Hunger Cravings

Red Rooster’s main priority is to ‘satisfy Australia’s chicken cravings. 

But how does one actually do that?

Jono and Chad from whiteGREY have combined technology and creativity to create crave_ware; a device embedded in a tee-shirt that can detect exactly the intensity of a craving and order Red Rooster on your stomach’s behalf.

It cuts out the middleman and listens to the rumbles and tumbles of your belly to decide a perfect combination that will satisfy your craving. It’s a tad ludicrous, and Jono and Chad are aware of this accusation. However, to them, there is nothing more fun than training AI to detect the sound of hunger vs the sound of wind.

“You’ve got two systems. System one and system two behaviours, the head and the heart. This is system zero, which bypasses both head and heart and goes straight to the stomach,” Chad said. 

Jono, the tech wiz, explained the science behind the training AI to detect rumbles. He listened to hours upon hours of different bodily noises, getting ‘very familiar with colleagues and clients,’ he said. 

He fed AI with 80% of the knowledge and left the remaining 20% for the AI software to figure out on its own. The rest was waiting for the a-ha moment when AI finally reached a confidence point of 90% accuracy in detecting the different types of noises. 

The moment that the AI software was able to detect a rumble by itself was described by Jono as a triumph. 

“When I saw it light up after I gave it training data it had never heard before and it came back to me with a 95% rumble reading, I knew we had made it.’ he said. 

The team at whiteGREY was constantly involved in the fun of creating this software. Every Monday meeting, Chad would ask Jono to give a ‘rumble update,’ which never failed to provide a good laugh.

Chad touched on Red Rooster’s journey within Australia to become recognised as an innovative brand, especially when in competition with the big US players. Crave_ware is the next step in engaging new audiences while also giving the hardcore fans something new and exciting to play with.  

“Everytime we tell someone about this as an idea, they smile! It’s interesting that as an industry we’ve been talking about how we’ve been losing the joy and an idea like this that combines hardcore tech with a problem that no one knew they need to solve is bringing some of that joy back,” he said.   

While the physical device is currently being used by influencers such as Issac Eats-a-Lot and devoted fans of Red Rooster, there also is currently an app that will allow the public to submit rumble data to improve the software.

 

Both Chad and Jono touched on the world of creativity and technology working together. They made a note to never separate the two when it comes to brainstorming ideas, as one can never really know if an idea is possible without the other. 

“A year ago, or even a few months ago, this wouldn’t have been possible without spending millions of dollars,” Chad said. 

“If there is one thing I’ve learnt, it’s to never say never when it comes to technology. It can enable much more than we thought it could.” added Jono. 

With the industry currently debating on the ‘right’ way to use AI, Jono and Chad have integrated AI seamlessly into this idea.

With the heart of Red Rooster’s ethos of satisfying Australia’s chicken cravings, whiteGREY have provided a customer experience that, at its core, is outrageously fun and completely innovative.