Productivity

Kroger says its AI Shopping Assistant is making baskets bigger — a new discovery layer small CPG brands can't ignore

At Groceryshop 2026, Kroger's chief digital officer said removing planning friction gave shoppers more headspace to add items, not fewer — reshaping how products get discovered across 11 million daily customers.

By Esi Boateng· Productivity tools·2026-09-23·3 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Nathália Rosa — A shopper pushing a cart down a grocery store aisle

Kroger’s AI Shopping Assistant is making baskets bigger, and the mechanism isn’t what CPG buyers have spent a decade optimizing for. Speaking at the opening session of Groceryshop 2026 in Las Vegas on Tuesday, September 22, Kroger’s executive vice president and chief digital officer Yael Cosset said the assistant, now rolled out across all Kroger banners as of summer 2026, is driving incremental spend by taking planning off the shopper’s hands.

“By removing the friction, we’re giving more time, more space for the customer to also think broadly beyond just that occasion, and that’s resulted in an increment[al growth],” Cosset said, calling the outcome “obviously very positive for us as a retailer and also our CPG partners.”

The framing matters because it inverts a long-running assumption. The keyword search box rewarded brands that bought placement and won on SEO. An assistant that plans meals, respects budgets, and honors dietary needs rewards brands whose product data is legible to a model. Kroger’s family of companies serves 11 million customers daily and employs more than 400,000 associates, and Cosset said adoption has spread relatively evenly across customer segments. That’s a discovery layer, not a pilot.

The basket-growth story isn’t isolated. Supermarket News reported on September 23 that DoorDash’s AI is driving grocery baskets 50% larger. Kroger hasn’t disclosed its own lift.

Cosset described the assistant as “directed inspiration” and said Kroger is deliberately not picking a model winner: “We’re not in the business of choosing the winner. Things are moving so fast.” He added, “We’ve removed the need to really be choiceful on the channel and bringing together both of these worlds in a very efficient way.” Behind the shelf, Kroger’s AI gateway processes several trillion tokens annually across trillions of forecasting dimensions covering replenishment and in-store picking. “AI behind the scene, behind the shelf, as I’d like to refer to it, is equally important,” he said.

Cosset framed Kroger’s roadmap in three stages, assisted, augmented, and autonomous, with an “AI driver’s license” program training the full 400,000-plus workforce. And he was blunt about the substrate: “The data layer is probably underestimated. If you don’t address that data and stay committed to controlling the integrity of that data, you are going to inject some risk and some uncertainty and lack of accuracy in your artificial intelligence investment.”

“Food is a source of emotional connection in families, with friends, and we’re all about bringing that to life for our customers and removing whatever we call the mundane, functional aspect of shopping,” Cosset said. For the brands on the shelf, the mundane, functional aspect is where the recommendation now happens.

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