Digitizing Handshake Quality: How Eurogast Maintains Trust at Scale

In the world of gastronomy, trust isn’t built on contracts. It is built on a handshake. This philosophy of handshake quality has been the foundation of Eurogast, an Austrian food services wholesaler.

However, how does a company like Euorgast maintain that level of personal intimacy while serving everyone from small family-run pizzerias to large hotel chains, delivering up to 40,000 products multiple times a week?

In a recent SAP CX Expert Exchange podcast, Andreas Falbesoner, Head of Group IT at Eurogast, told Robert Holland, Vice President and Research Director at SAPinsider, how the company is using technology to deepen human connections.

A Human-Centric Tech Stack

Falbesoner emphasized that in the B2B food industry, customers aren’t anonymous; they are specific chefs and owners with unique needs. To serve them, Eurogast moved away from rigid software systems to a flexible, unified SAP Customer Experience (CX) platform that connects directly with the company’s ERP data.

This integration is critical because it breaks down silos. So, a sales agent visiting a kitchen can know everything—from delivery tracking to recent service tickets—in one view. However, Falbesoner noted that the real innovation lies in how this data is used to make the chef’s life easier.

Innovation with Soul

Perhaps the most compelling example of Eurogast’s strategy that Falbesoner shared was the “Best Friend Voice” solution. He explained this with the example of a busy kitchen, where a chef often doesn’t have time to log into a portal and click through menus. In these cases, the company uses the solution so that:

• The customer simply speaks their order into their phone—for example, 10 schnitzels, 10 chickens, 10 tomatoes.
• The system then uses AI combined with historical SAP CX data to instantly recognize which schnitzel or chicken the specific customer usually buys.
• The order is then processed in seconds.

As Falbesoner noted, “It allows a chef to place an order in 10 seconds and get back to cooking.”

Eurogast also introduced a feature called the Essence List. According to Falbesoner, instead of forcing customers to search through 40,000 SKUs, the system analyzes their purchase history over the last 12 months to proactively suggest their essentials. It’s a simple, data-driven touch that mimics a good waiter knowing your usual.

The Metric That Matters

Interestingly, when asked about KPIs, Falbesoner didn’t point to traditional efficiency stats. He stated that the project was decided on the goal of building relationships so strong that competitors can’t replace them.

“The only metric is having the customer being still our customer in two or three years,” he told SAPinsider.

Looking ahead, Eurogast aims for hyper-personalization. The goal is an automated system that recognizes a pizzeria logging in and immediately surfaces pizza ingredients or identifies trending dishes in the region to help customers stay competitive.

Finally, Eurogast offers a clear lesson for many SAP end users: The most powerful CX doesn’t just process orders; it understands the person placing them.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Deep integration is the prerequisite for innovation. Eurogast’s ability to offer features like the Essence List relies entirely on breaking down data silos between the back and front offices. The system pulls deep historical data from the ERP, including offline Cash & Carry purchases and past invoices. For SAPinsiders, the value of CX tools is often capped by their isolation. To replicate Eurogast’s success, organizations must ensure their SAP Commerce Cloud (or equivalent CX platform) has a real-time, bi-directional flow with the ERP. Without that single source of truth, advanced personalization remains a theoretical exercise.

AI needs contextual memory to be effective. The Best Friend Voice feature offers a masterclass in applying AI correctly, as it is deeply integrated with Eurogast’s customer data. It shows that AI requires clean, structured master data to function. Thus, SAPinsiders should first focus on data hygiene and the accessibility of historical records within their SAP CX environment. This is because AI’s intelligence is proportional to the quality of the customer context it is fed.

Configure for the human exception. Falbesoner explicitly warned against building a software monolith where rigid processes block human service. During supply chain disruptions (like the pandemic), Eurogast found that technology had to empower sales agents to find pragmatic solutions rather than lock them into a standard workflow. This indicates that when architecting SAP solutions, organizations must resist the urge to over-engineer rigid workflows. They should ensure the configuration allows for handshake-quality exceptions—giving sales and service agents the permissions and system flexibility to bypass standard protocols when a customer emergency demands it.