Square and MarketMan Debut AI-Powered Restaurant Inventory Tool

Square has debuted a tool designed to give restaurants more visibility into ingredient usage.

Square Restaurant Inventory, developed in partnership with inventory management platform MarketMan, is designed to offer “AI-driven ingredient and recipe management within the Square platform,” the companies said in a Thursday (April 2) news release.

“Restaurants shouldn’t have to guess when managing one of their most important and controllable expenses,” said Morgan Kuntze, global partnerships lead at Square parent company Block.

The inventory solution solves this, Kuntze added, by adding forecasting and “ingredient-level intelligence” directly to Square’s platform.

“Sellers can now confidently translate these insights into tangible improvements: streamlining recipe management, batch prepping, and updating menus,” she said. “By eliminating the friction of juggling multiple systems and contracts, we’re enabling restaurants to operate smarter in a single destination.”

The tool also lets operators automate purchase orders, manage vendors and suppliers, and scan invoices, while still monitoring waste and identifying loss trends before they begin to affect a restaurant’s margins.

In other restaurant news, PYMNTS wrote recently about a recalibration happening in the industry as eateries examine their relationship with delivery platforms.

“Increasingly, restaurants are rethinking the trade-offs embedded in the delivery economy,” that report said. “What once looked like a growth channel can now resemble something closer to disintermediation.”

The critical issue emerging, PYMNTS added, is not only the last-mile problem of delivery itself, but ownership of and connection to the customer relationship.

It’s unlikely that the delivery landscape will go back to the pre-platform era, the report said, as the scale and convenience of major apps have transformed consumer expectations. However, with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven commerce and retail solutions, the industry could be shifting into its next era, one where restaurants are not simply passive participants.

“In an agent ordering world, you’re going to be ordering from your TV, from your car, from your phone,” Savneet Singh, CEO of PAR Technology, told PYMNTS in an interview last month, adding that those orders can connect directly to the restaurant rather than passing through third-party marketplaces.

“That means the restaurant has the data, understands the customer’s preferences, and doesn’t pay a toll to another platform,” Singh added.

Research from the PYMNTS Intelligence January 2026 B2B and Digital Payments Tracker, “Value-Driven Innovation: How Restaurants Are Adapting to Digital Expectations,” found that close to two-thirds of restaurant delivery decisions are guided by loyalty programs.

“I think data is probably our greatest resource next to our people,” Kevin Vasconi, chief digital and technology officer at Papa Johns, said in a March interview with PYMNTS.