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Retail Media Breakfast Club
Why AI Grocery Shopping Isn’t Taking Over Yet (But Absolutely Will)
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I cook a lot. My family eats at home for the vast majority of meals. Not out of obligation, but preference. Most days around 4 o' clock I put on my slippers, I throw on a podcast, I get my kitchen appliances going, my daily drivers are my Thermomix and air fryer, and for about an hour or so I slide into recipe land. But as a result of this delicious hobby, I am constantly buying groceries. And that part is often just not fun. Shopping is fun is the most common pushback I hear to the concept of AI enabled shopping and especially the largely still conceptual idea of agentic shopping. People love to go to the store to touch and feel fabrics, to squeeze their own avocados. Why would they hand that over to a bot? And look, I love a good dose of retail therapy too. The thrill of the hunt, the satisfaction of knowing I got the very best thing. But not all shopping missions are created equal. Some are repetitive. I always need milk. Some have well defined parameters. In the coffee category I'm brand loyal, in milk I'm not. And sometimes the fun part has already happened. The recipe planning. And what's left is just executing a list. Recent research from FMI bears this out. While many Americans say they enjoy grocery shopping, overall their actual behavior tells them more often operational story 83% of people make lists, 79% take household inventory before shopping, 69% meal plan, and 60% actively seek coupons or discounts. They're not just browsing for pleasure, they are managing a project. So it's not surprising that people are most comfortable with the idea of delegating the parts of grocery shopping that they find tedious and least comfortable handing over parts the parts that they enjoy. PwC's 2025 consumer survey found that 47% of consumers are comfortable letting generative AI help with meal planning, 41% are comfortable with AI helping with grocery budgeting, and 36% of people are comfortable with predictive shopping lists based on order history. This is where consumers are already signaling where they'd welcome AI to help. Andrea Ley, who is the founder and CEO of Illum Group, recently posted on LinkedIn about using ChatGPT to build a browser extension that automates her grocery shopping. On Fred Meyer's website, she said with three teenagers in the house, she's buying a lot of food and that she hates grocery shopping. In her post she says, why do I have to add over 25 items to my cart one by one? So she spent a couple of hours iterating with ChatGPT gave it her rules like her preferred buy again items clip coupons if they exist. And now she dumps her entire list and the extension adds everything to her cart while she does something else. Now, 15 people in her network immediately jumped in to ask for this same script from Andrea. They wanted to do it themselves. Now, something that stood out to me about Andrea's post is that for someone as tech savvy as Andrea, who is a former Amazon executive and someone who works in this ecosystem, it still took her a couple of hours of tinkering and a self described, maybe sketchy browser extension to actually get to this point. The demand for automation is there, but the tools are not. Now you might be thinking, haven't grocery retailer apps already solved this drudgery problem? We have subscribe and Save. We have retailers showing frequently bought items. We have reorder lists, we have recipe integrations. But they're still not really addressing the core problem. As one commenter on Andrea's post put it, my weekly grocery shop has tried hard on this. We've had favorites recently, regulars, instant shop, and recurrent orders. All are useful, but none quite crack the messy middle. Some items are every week, most are some weeks, but not all. And yes, we get bored of the same flavor very quickly. That was Barangire Chantro Fuk, a product and marketing leader and former Amazon and ebay executive. She went on to note that the grocery platform she uses has years of granular weekly shopping data, and that a good use of AI would spot those patterns and know when to suggest something new. And she's right. The tools that retailers have built so far assume that shopping is either fully routine, like with subscribe and Save, which by the way, with an Amazon ecosystem where the price fluctuates, that is a major barrier for adoption. Because one day my son's favorite cereal is $5 a box and the next day it's 11. And so that isn't an ideal shopping experience. So those tools either assume shopping is either fully routine or fully manual, like a browser ad. But the reality is messier, and a lot of grocery shopping lives in between. But don't people want to squeeze their own avocados? And this is the truest question. And it is real. Grocery Delivery companies like FreshDirect, Instacart, et cetera discovered very early on that one of the hardest trust gaps to close was with produce. Not whether shoppers wanted convenience, but whether they trusted someone else to pick subjective for fresh items correctly. Instacart recently said that bananas are its number one selling item, and also that it's the item with the highest volume of customer notes because ripeness preferences are so personal and so you've probably seen this on Instacart or Fresh Direct. There is like a ripeness preference option when you're selecting out selecting your produce. Miracle Ads is the only retail media solution designed for both 1P and 3Pmarketplace brands. Why does that matter? Marketplace sellers demand a seamless advertiser experience that still offers full funnel ad formats, and retailers need a flexible solution that allows you to scale your media business. Learn more@miracle.com that's mirakl.com but this trust question extends beyond produce. In recent research conducted by a Quad and Harris poll, 81% of consumers agreed that it's easier for brands to misrepresent product quality online than it is in store. Touch and inspection still matter across a lot of categories, but I keep coming back to this these are engineering problems, not permanent features of consumer psychology. Instacart built a whole system around banana ripeness notes. Freshdirect as far back as 2003 was building separate temperature controlled rooms for different types of produce and running internal quality control systems. The trust gap in grocery delivery was real, and companies spent years closing it. There is no reason the trust gap in agentic shopping can't follow that same path. The real barrier isn't psychology, it's the technology. I spent 10 minutes on Sunday deciding which meals to cook this week that was fun. Then I spent 20 minutes manually adding those items to my online grocery cart that was not part of that time included looking for ways to make the process faster. It's 2026. Come on. But no, I still had to go item by item and find products where I already have clear buying parameters. The consumer grade experience for agentic grocery shopping simply doesn't exist yet. OpenAI pulled back from in app checkout earlier this year, acknowledging that its initial version is didn't offer the flexibility that merchants needed. The company is now letting merchants use their own checkout flows while it focuses on improving product discovery. And maybe that is where we remain long term. You can also try using an AI web browser to shop, but a lot of retailer websites aren't really built to accommodate AI navigation. Thus Andrea Lay's workaround. But the demand is there. A 2025 survey of US consumers by Content Square summarized this consumer mood People want AI to handle the boring parts of shopping, not the parts that they enjoy. 30% said they'd let an AI agent complete a purchase on their behalf. So it's still not the majority Maybe people with a higher risk tolerance for now, but. But again, this is how E commerce emerged as well. It was risky and weird to put your credit card onto the Internet. Anything could happen. But over time, as people had positive experiences, they were more willing to adopt that technology and process more frequently. Another report from Visa issued this year tells a similar story. But. But actually, in this one, 2/3 of consumers use or would use AI shopping agents to save time and find better prices. But 9 out of 10 want transparency into how agents make decisions, and about half of consumers have a fear that purchases will be made without them. Now, that is not resistance to a new way of shopping. That is a reasonable set of conditions that the technology hasn't met yet. All right, let's wrap up. For my husband's birthday last week, I made a key lime pie from scratch. I squeezed the limes by hand. I made the graham cracker crust with real butter, the whole thing. And that was fun. Genuinely, one of my favorite things to do. What wasn't fun was manually adding all of those ingredients to my shopping list. The limes, the. The condensed milk, et cetera. I already knew what I needed. The final step of translating that into a purchasable shopping list was the drudgery. And this is how behavior changes. Not with a single dramatic shift or a product release, but on the fringes, with people like Andrea spending two hours wrangling some code into a grocery automation tool because the real thing doesn't exist yet. As she put it, maybe the future of agentic commerce is everyone building their own little tools to solve their own little problems. For the people saying agentic shopping won't have broad appeal. Sure, not yet. Because the technology to make it easy, safe, and trustworthy doesn't fully exist yet. But the desire does. And if this industry has taught me anything, it's that consumer behavior follows capability, sometimes faster than anyone expects.