Groceryshop 2025: AI Talk Turns to Results, Value Gets Redefined

Grocery retailers arrived at Groceryshop in Las Vegas this year armed with results, not theories, on AI — and DoorDash brought the hardest number of the week: shoppers using its AI assistant Ask DoorDash spend 50% more per basket.

The show's biggest topics matched last year's — AI and "value" — but the conversations shifted from speculation to measured outcomes as retailers have pushed consumer-facing AI applications into the market.

AI assistants graduate from concept to commerce

Instacart CEO Chris Rogers opened the show's first main stage session with a bold claim: "grocery is going to be the category out of every retail category that's most transformed by AI."

Earlier this month, Instacart launched Clementine, an AI grocery assistant that turns handwritten shopping lists into full carts and suggests grocery lists based on dietary preferences or budgetary restrictions. Rogers urged grocers to build their own assistants rather than cede the experience to the major AI platforms.

"I think the industry will probably end up working with [Anthropic, Gemini, and OpenAI], but I also think that it's up to us and everybody here to make sure that the absolute best agentic experiences are on our own channels," he said. "And to do that, we need to make sure that we're obtaining our valuable data and we're putting that data to work."

DoorDash Co-Founder Andy Fang shared results from Ask DoorDash, which the company rolled out in June. Beyond the 50% higher basket sizes, AI-assisted shoppers check out five times faster and buy 60% more unique SKUs than non-AI shoppers, he said. The bot drives those gains by suggesting meal-planning items and related products — like plates or utensils — that consumers might forget to add to cart themselves.

Kroger launched the latest version of its AI shopping assistant in July. Chief Digital Officer Yael Cosset said the tool has helped narrow the gap between consumers' inspiration and basket building with Kroger.

PepsiCo struck a more cautious note. Mike Glaser, VP of commerce media at PepsiCo, said the CPG giant has found 1 in 3 US grocery shoppers now turn to AI in their shopping. But that adoption doesn't make PepsiCo bullish on retail media opportunities within LLM-driven experiences.

"Probably be in this test phase until this format starts to grow and get governed by some of the other retail media network principles," Glaser said of the company's approach. "It's too soon to say it's going to dramatically change anything."

Value moves beyond price

On value, speakers moved past last year's price-focused conversations — which featured Lidl and Whole Foods on keeping prices low — toward a broader definition.

Price still matters. Rogers said retailers on Instacart without marked-up prices are growing 10 percentage points faster than their counterparts, and they retain those customers. He framed the trade-off directly for grocers weighing markups.

"The cost of losing sales and share over time to some of the largest digital players might be greater than the cost of removing markups today," he said.

But price is now "table stakes," according to Hy-Vee CEO Jeremy Gosch. Service — which he defined as "whatever the customer needs, whenever they want it, wherever they want it" — and quality deserve equal weight. Speakers from Sam's Club, Chobani and Target added convenience, newness and curation to the list of core value measures.

Dollar General has put the convenience pillar to work. Lydia Thacher, VP of digital commerce at Dollar General, said the retailer has grown and established repeat business for its private label brand Clover Valley by selling the products on third-party delivery platforms like DoorDash.

Thacher argued that as value becomes more multifaceted, retailers and brands must stop treating "value-conscious" consumers as a distinct demographic.

"We're all looking for value, whether that's in price or whether that's in convenience, time, and making your life a little bit easier," she said. "Every week can look different for every type of consumer."

With AI assistants now demonstrably lifting basket size and checkout speed, and value redefined as price plus service, quality and convenience, the pressure shifts to grocers and CPG brands to prove both on their own channels.