How CookUnity runs an AI-first operation while not losing sight of its special sauce

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Meet CookUnity

CookUnity is the only food platform that connects chefs directly with customers across North America It’s neither a delivery service nor a restaurant aggregator, but a platform purpose-built around extraordinary cooks, including Michelin-star chefs and James Beard Award winners. The founding premise was that the meal delivery market was missing the human behind the food. Most services optimized for convenience. CookUnity optimized for the chef, building direct relationships between cooks and consumers that create something no algorithm can replicate: a meal that carries the identity, craft, and story of the person who made it. That decision built a business with real operational complexity: nearly 2,000 employees spanning a national chef network, warehouse and logistics teams, corporate staff, and the G&A infrastructure that connects it all.

At CookUnity, the people aren't just the workforce, they're the product. The chefs are the brand. Which means that how the company manages, supports, and enables its people has a direct line to the experience customers receive. It's why Dave Senior, Head of Applied AI, thinks so carefully about the systems CookUnity runs on. "CookUnity does not exist without our people," he said. "The chefs, the operations people, finance, and G&A — and without a platform like Rippling, we just wouldn't be able to scale."

That's the context Samantha Levenson stepped into when she joined as VP Talent. She didn't walk into a broken system — she walked into a foundation already built for AI. Rippling was in place. The data was centralized. What she found was what a modern people operation looks like when the infrastructure is right.

Why Rippling: the operational backbone for an AI-first company

For Dave, CookUnity isn't just using AI, it's building a company where AI can actually do something. And that requires a harder question than most companies ask: what does your AI actually know about your business?

Generic AI tools don't know your org chart. They don't know who your employees are, what they earn, how your teams have shifted, or who reports to whom. They can answer questions about the world. They can't answer questions about your company. That's the gap Dave thinks about. "The quality of systems and underlying data matter almost more than the technology itself," he said. The model isn't the constraint, the context is.

Rippling is how CookUnity closes that gap. When payroll, benefits, org chart, and company information all live in one connected place, AI can work with the full picture, and more importantly, it can act on it. That's the difference between a tool that summarizes and a tool that runs things.

Instant answers, in the middle of a meeting

Samantha describes a call with one of CookUnity's marketing teams. They were debating org design: who was in what role, when, and how the team had evolved. Questions that would normally require a trip through Slack, a call with an HRBP, and questions for someone with institutional memory. Instead, Samantha typed a query directly into Rippling AI, asking for a full growth trajectory of the department over time. The response came back in five seconds. "Within five seconds we were able to solve the problem," she said. "We avoided another meeting or two. It was instant and immediate right in front of me."

What that five seconds replaced wasn't just time. Without Rippling AI, the same question would have meant going back to the business partner, the recruiter, and someone who had been at the company long enough to remember the history. Three or four additional people, pulled in for a question that should have had an immediate answer. One query in Rippling AI replaced all of it.

Reports at the speed of a question

At most companies, getting a specific workforce report means building it from scratch: dragging fields into side panels, running the query repeatedly, hoping the output eventually matches what you actually needed. At CookUnity, Samantha describes a different experience entirely: asking.

"With Rippling AI, I can instruct it to pull the report and then look at the data and iterate as necessary," she said. "The foundation is there." The shift from manually constructing a report to simply describing what you need saves her team two to four hours per business partner per week. Hours that go directly back into the strategic work: comp analysis, career development, org design, and more.

Decisions backed by data you can trust

The bigger payoff from having a single source of truth isn't the time saved on individual reports, it's the strategic decisions that become possible. CookUnity is currently rethinking its compensation framework: identifying gaps, benchmarking roles across the workforce, and building a comp strategy competitive enough to attract and retain the talent that make the brand what it is. All of it runs through Rippling.

"We've been using Rippling to identify some of the gaps or call outs in our workforce and are looking to amend that by updating our compensation framework," Samantha said. The confidence to make that call comes directly from data integrity. "Since Rippling is our source of truth across the organization, I know that all of the answers coming out of it are accurate."

Payroll that runs itself

For a workforce as varied as CookUnity's, (hourly workers, salaried staff across multiple locations) payroll accuracy isn't optional, it's the foundation of trust. Ask Samantha what happens in Rippling without anyone having to drive it manually, and the first answer is payroll. "One thing that works really well for us in Rippling is our payroll reports. We pay payroll effectively and on time with the automation of that report coming through."

The impact

Hours back, every week

Rippling AI saves Samantha's team two to four hours per business partner per week on reporting and administrative tasks. Those hours go back to comp analysis, career development, org design — the strategic work HR leaders actually want to be doing.

Decisions in seconds, not meetings

Mid-meeting org history question? Comp gap analysis? Complex headcount trend? Samantha types it into Rippling AI and has the answer in five seconds. That speed isn't just convenient, it's the difference between a decision made in the room and a decision deferred to next week.

A people team that serves everyone

Samantha's team covers all 2,000 CookUnity employees: hourly workers, corporate staff, operations. With Rippling handling the operational load, they can focus on making every employee's experience at CookUnity productive, exciting, and fulfilling

What's next for CookUnity

For Samantha, the compensation strategy underway is one of many decisions Rippling is enabling. As the People Team grows into its strategic mandate, it's building on a foundation that most HR teams don't have: clean, connected, trustworthy data already in one place.

For Dave, the future looks like personalization at a scale that wasn't previously possible: AI tools that optimize meals for individual customers, accelerate supply chain decisions, and connect chefs with consumer preferences in ways that make the brand's chef-first promise even more real.

"Being AI first really starts with the people," Dave said. "They're the foundation of our business. And now with AI, we can scale that to all of our customers."

At CookUnity, the chefs come first. The technology makes sure that's still true at scale.