Making Life a Little Easier With Personalised Shopping
- Tesco, serving millions of customers every week, wanted to make meal planning and grocery shopping less of a chore, moving beyond static lists into something genuinely personalised and useful.
- In a single in-app experience, Tesco and Tomoro teams built an assistant that turns a simple conversation into action by generating recipes, adapting to dietary needs, and instantly building a tailored shopping basket based on each customer’s habits.
- Now rolling out to 280,000 colleagues for real-world testing, this end-to-end AI shopping journey works in everyday life.
How often do you find yourself stuck on what your household is going to eat this week? Staring at ingredients fast approaching their use-by date, no idea what to do with them. While you have an idea of what to cook, you scroll for inspiration and get food envy instead. You factor in dietary requirements, a picky eater, a tight budget and fall back on the same five meals you always make.
Meal planning is a small problem that compounds daily, wasting food, money and time. Multiply that across millions of households and it becomes a significant one.
Tesco's new AI assistant, built directly into the Tesco app, is designed to solve it with a genuine two-way conversation. Tell it what you’re thinking to cook, what you're avoiding, what you're in the mood for. It generates personalised recipe ideas, accounts for your dietary preferences, and builds your shopping basket from the result, all drawing on your history to find the right products for you and your household.
Natasha Adams, Tesco's Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer, is direct about the ambition: "In the long term, this assistant has the potential to transform the way people shop with us — harnessing the enormous power of AI to personalise the shopping experience for our customers in ways that ultimately save them time, stress and money."
That work begins now. Around 280,000 Tesco colleagues are being invited to road test the assistant before it reaches all customers later this year. The largest private sector workforce in the country is stress-testing the experience in their real day-to-day lives. As Adams puts it: "Nobody is better placed than our colleagues to help us get this technology right."
The assistant is rolling out to 280,000 colleagues inside the Tesco app, to be used and tested in their actual lives.
A customer describes what they plan to cook and the sort of meals they need, receives a recipe, adapts it and watches a basket populate in real time. This is a real customer journey that works end to end as a single continuous experience.
Ash Garner, Tomoro's co-founder, puts it plainly: "Getting this into the hands of Tesco colleagues is an exciting next step in evolving an experience designed to make life a little easier for every customer."
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