Grocery shopping, by conversation
22 grocery brands, from Safeway to Vons
2 min read
In December 2025, Albertsons Companies launched the Albertsons AI shopping assistant on the websites of all its grocery brands, from Albertsons and Safeway to Vons and Jewel-Osco. We worked with Albertsons' team to build it.
What it does
The assistant does the shopping, not only the searching. A shopper can ask it to:
- restock the things they buy every week
- plan the week's meals and put the ingredients in the cart
- turn a typed or photographed list into products
- suggest recipes from what's already in the fridge
- shop a recipe from a link or a photo
- pull together ideas and offers for the next holiday
Albertsons says it can take a 46-minute grocery shop down to as little as four minutes.
What we did
We started with one question: could a language model plan a week of meals and turn it into a grocery order? We built the first version with Albertsons' team, then worked on what it takes to run that for a grocer at Albertsons' scale:
- search that understands what people mean, like "low-calorie breakfast," and not only product names
- memory of a household's preferences, from one week to the next
- testing and tracing, so the team can see how the assistant behaves and keep improving it
We worked in Albertsons' codebase alongside their engineers, and handed over the systems and documentation so their team runs the assistant on its own.
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