This is a post about food.
I arrived in France two months ago. My husband had his usual grocery routine. People vary in their tastes but core products remain the same. It’s how we choose who we are. In Tennessee I bought California olive oil and Huy Fong sriracha as a way to keep a little bit of home in my cabinet. Walking through the rayons at Super U, I understood the products, I speak French well enough, but I didn’t know them. A new identity.
Sitting in a small French town near Luxembourg wondering who am I without food, I wanted something that helps me with the implicit part of grocery purchases. Before it looked up a single price, I wanted it to understand who I am.
Because
Food is the thing we buy most often and the thing we’ve bought longest. Someone was deciding what to put in a pot three thousand years ago. Someone will be in three thousand more. It’s also the most visible way people consume an identity. Each choice you make is how you make your internal conception tangible, concrete.
My last employer’s version was on the walls and advertised, food is connection. On my 31st birthday, the first one 2,000 miles away from family, sitting alone in a new apartment, questioning what I had done, I bought sprinkle cupcakes because my little sister would make that for my birthday when we were living together. The shopping cart is as much a portrait of the person buying it as it is the event itself.
My food choices are a reflection of who I am, informed by how I was raised. A large family required cooking in batches, asynchronous feeding. It could be feast or famine, so we would freeze rice and beans in bulk to economize. Physical presence with each other while eating was the exception, so we connected in what we prepared for each other. I worked graveyard shifts, so I’d leave Jambalaya I made at 6am in the fridge for my family, and would open the fridge at 10pm to pot roast and vegetables. Changes in the refrigerator helped us communicate our lives, even if we saw each other a few hours a week.
My tastes evolved. I keep the spicy foods that my family loved, but started cooking more southern dishes, Tennessee. My husband and I met online, and as I came to learn his ravenous sweet tooth, I started buying more sweet things. If we were separated by 6,000 miles, I could at least think of him with what I cooked.
Once I got to France, I started from the basics. I knew the brands I bought in Nashville, but they were informed by what I liked in myself. I bought trail mix because it fit multiple identities: it was a big bag, low in price. It followed nutritional buckets my doctor recommended, having lost 120 lbs. It made me think of my husband. Food choices go beyond what tastes good. Somebody raised differently would optimize for organic, or for time, or for what the table looks like on Sunday. Trail mix here comes in smaller bags and is more expensive. It’s the same product inside. It isn’t the same.
AI
Everyone is adding AI. Instacart launched one last week. Walmart has Sparky, Amazon has Alexa, and Carrefour has one too, all doing the same thing. You say what you want and they build a basket, including recommendations from other likeminded customers, possibly your history. That’s fine. But it’s still a search box, one that talks. A tool built on a website helps you build your basket, but it doesn’t let you talk about the why. The company is footing the bill for the compute and the tokens. It’s not your psychologist.
There’s a missed opportunity. Food goes so far beyond whether the association rules says that Mark buying Pampers and Purina probably will want Budweiser, or the Holt-Winters model says that Mary buys coffee every Sunday so she’ll buy it again next Sunday. The food you buy, it’s pictures, it’s words, it’s insecurity. I get why the economics makes it impossible for any company to address this (someone has to pay for the tokens), but it still feels like a massive miss. Something that can get a clear read on why I buy things can help me understand what I want to buy to be who I am, my ideal self.
It’s a simple system, and I hope that more grocery players get into that space, but there’s a difficulty. The store has a model of you, forecasted and optimized for expected customer lifetime value. There’s an incentive for a tool to be smart more than intelligent. Its recommendations are bets on what you’ll buy. You’re still left wondering who is the person buying it.
Agents
I built a plugin to try to reconstruct some of how I communicate who I am to myself through food. It’s a simple agent. Two part system. The first has a searcher and a promos. That’s it. For Super U it borrows my browser cookie and replays browsing like if I were on the page.
The second part is an agent. Where I pasted the purchases I made at Kroger, pictures of recipes I like, wrote about the types of food that I like, what I like to do, the restaurants I gave up, foods I can’t find here. That we’re two adults in a small flat with a small fridge and no freezer. We batch cook in a pressure cooker. Cheap and good, in that order, and nothing that rots before we get to it. I don’t sweeten coffee. My husband will eat the same chocolate cereal every day for the rest of his life and I will eat oatmeal with honey, and neither of us is going to change.
For now, I’d like to keep AI on my side of the fence to avoid becoming a commodity, but any level of in depth customization means I’m paying tokens to serve it.
Before the first order, I also gave it fifteen orders of purchase history from my old grocer in Nashville, pasted raw off the page with the navigation menus still in it. Pictures from cabinets in Nashville. What home looked like through food. It pulled out instant coffee, which was on every order, and sriracha and tofu, and it was right about all three. It also pulled out canned tuna and sugar. I stopped eating tuna a year ago and I’ve never put sugar in coffee.
As I talked through it, the agent added to a preferences.md. Never suggest. Already stocked. Watch list. Not stocked at this store, stop searching, no I don’t like onions, those cookies are too soft. Each came from an individual mistake in searching. The agent had a hypothesis, tested it out and recommended a product. Somewhere around line thirty I realised it’s the identity paragraph, one wrong guess at a time.
Whose agent
The stores say so themselves, in the numbers they publish. Walmart reports that customers who use its assistant spend about 35% more per order than customers who don’t. Instacart’s, five days old, already produces baskets above the company’s 115 dollar average, and that’s the headline of the launch. Walmart is testing ads inside the answers. The assistant lives inside the store, ranks the store’s catalogue, ends at checkout, and is graded on how much more you spent.
The protocols being written now, so that an agent in a chat can reach a store’s systems, come from the platforms and the payment networks. Google’s has two signed documents. The first records what you asked for, and the example in the announcement is “Find me new white running shoes.” The second records the exact items and the price. There’s a field for what you want and a field for what you’ll pay. There’s no field for who you’re trying to be.
I’m hoping that the systems become more intelligent. That I can link ChatGPT to Carrefour from the other side of the fence, and it works collaboratively with me. I don’t mind if advertised products make it back, or if there’s a recommendation algorithm alongside it. It feels like a wasted opportunity when all the pieces are there. Mine exists by borrowing my own cookie and working through my browser. It reads the same prices as one of their assistants would but comes to different answers.
