AI for Food Brands: How to Work Smarter in Six Weeks

Learn the fundamentals of AI, get expert coaching, and build a functioning business asset. 

This new SFA course demystifies AI for specialty food professionals. Over six weeks, an expert coach will guide you to a fuller understanding of how AI tools can save your business time and resources. By the end, you'll build a working asset, workflow, or system you can start to use immediately.

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Your Coach

Sharon Gai, Author & Keynote Speaker

What to Expect

This fully virtual course runs from October 1 – November 13, 2026, and covers: 

Introduction to AI, important tools, and best practices

How to outsource business functions

Design and finalize a working asset, system, or workflow

Learn, Test, and Build

This course is not about chasing every new AI tool or adding more complexity to your busy workflows.  

It is about helping you decide where AI can support work you are already responsible for, and exploring how to create an asset or system to offer that support. 

Examples of AI capstones participants may build: 

  • AI Executive Assistant
  • Sales and Wholesale Outreach System
  • Trade Show Prep Toolkit
  • Research and Insights Dashboard
  • Content Production System
  • The possibilities are endless!

The course will also include:

  • Live, expert-led coaching sessions 
  • Hands-on application using participants’ real business tasks
  • Practical examples for marketing, customer service, sales, operations, research, and internal communications 
  • Guided exploration of AI tools and when to use them responsibly 
  • A customized AI capstone that becomes a working business asset, workflow, or system

  • This program is a strong fit for specialty food professionals who want AI to feel less like a mystery and more like a useful member of the team. 

    You're a strong fit if you: 

    • Are managing multiple parts of the business and need more capacity without adding more complexity  

    • Own a specific function, process, or set of responsibilities and want to optimize how that work gets done  

    • Are looking for practical ways to improve marketing, sales, customer communication, research, operations, internal processes, or recurring content creation  

    • Want expert guidance on when, where, and how to use AI responsibly in a specialty food business context  

    • Want to build a practical AI workflow, toolkit, system, or business asset they can put to use right away  

  • The course is built around practical application, not theory for theory’s sake.  

    What this looks like: 

    Participants begin with AI fundamentals, then move into prompting, tool exploration, and business-function support. Each step helps them connect AI to a real need, whether that is reducing time spent on repetitive tasks, improving communications, organizing research, strengthening a sales process, or creating a repeatable content workflow.  

    By the end of the course, participants should be able to identify the right tasks to delegate to AI, create stronger prompts and workflows, and build an AI-supported asset or process that helps them work more efficiently in their specific role or stage of business.  

  • Learning Modules 

    Module 1: Weeks 1-2 

    • Focus: Introduction to AI, important tools and best prompting practices 

    • What generative AI is in plain language, and a four-year timeline of how we got here. 

    • How to write a strong prompt with the CRAFT method and stop producing AI slop. 

    • Attendees run their first prompts on real tasks pulled from their own business, such as a product description, a customer email, and a supplier message.  

    • Attendees list recurring tasks and mark which ones a capable assistant could draft or speed up. That list becomes the shortlist for their capstone. 

    • Coaching Session Topic: Live prompting clinic. Each attendee brings one task they do every week and rebuilds it as a prompt alongside the coach, leaving the session with a working example they can use the next day. 

    Module 2: Weeks 3-4 

    • Focus: Outsource business functions.  

    • Explore the Claude tool as the central nervous system for your AI work.  

    • How to build custom assistants, reusable skills, connectors, and scheduled tasks that make Claude more useful for your specific work and goals.  

    • Attendees will use Claude to build practical, repeatable workflows for their own products or business. They may create custom assistants, skills, connectors, or scheduled tasks that help produce launch announcements, social posts, customer emails, research briefs, and other useful work.  

    • Coaching Session Topic: Attendees will share what they have built in Claude, including their assistants, skills, connectors, scheduled tasks, and resulting outputs. The instructor will offer live suggestions to improve each workflow and identify what to build next. 

    Module 3: Weeks 5-6 

    • Focus: Capstone! Design and ship an asset that runs in the business.  

    • Explore a wider set of AI tools and where each is most useful in the creative and business workflow.  

    • Attendees will work with Atlas, Claude, Nano Banana, Google veo, video-creation tools, ChatGPT and ChatGPT Sites, Gamma, and Claude Design. The goal is to understand what each tool does well and how to choose the right one for a specific task.  

    • Attendees will apply these tools to a practical business project of their choice. Projects may include an ecommerce website, social-media content system, new-product launch kit, wholesale buyer outreach engine, trade-show preparation system, SOP and onboarding playbook, or category and competitor research brief.  

    • Coaching Session Topic: Attendees will present their capstone progress, share the tools and workflow they used, and troubleshoot live with the instructor and peers. They will leave with feedback, a working project, and a clear plan for what to improve or expand next.