Carrefour has brought its grocery offering to ChatGPT in Belgium. The integration is provided by Mealz, a French artificial intelligence platform designed for grocery e-commerce. To turn the AI assistant into a new portal for grocery shopping, shoppers must activate a dedicated plugin.
The solution combines conversational AI with visual and clickable elements. Users can discuss with the interface to search for inspiration, discover a product or generate a personalised weekly meal plan. Meanwhile, displayed interactive widgets allow shoppers to compare brands, formats and prices to modify their basket with ease. To complete their order, customers are redirected to Carrefour website with the option to collect their groceries at pickup locations or have them delivered home within a day.
The challenge is for the technology to be able to translate customer requests and recipe ingredients into specific products and ingredients. Those must be listed within Carrefour’s catalogue with real-time price and availability. The solution is able to provide shoppers with items suited to their dietary preferences and allergies as well as displaying loyalty card benefits and promotional offers.
A middleware behind AI shopping
Mealz acts as a specialist middleware layer between ChatGPT and other large language models and retail systems. The former interprets the customer’s request, while Mealz handles orchestration, product matching and commercial logic. Carrefour benefits from a fast deployment while retaining control of its catalogue, orders and customer data, with no personal data transferred to the language model.
Mealz operates as a white-label solution integrated directly into websites and mobile apps of major French retailers such as Carrefour. It acts as a product placement and brand activation platform for both food manufacturers looking to boost their online visibility and retailers looking to push higher margins private labels into online shoppers’ baskets.
