Woolworths has unveiled an AI-powered food assistant that leans on conversational AI to help customers find recipes, plan meals and shop for ingredients directly through its mobile app.
Called My Woolies Chef, the tool will be handed to a limited group of MyDifference loyalty members from September as part of a beta test, with a wider rollout planned for early 2027, the retailer said. Rather than launch it to everyone at once, Woolworths is using the beta window to watch how customers actually behave, sharpen the quality of its recommendations and refine the experience before opening the doors.
The assistant is built around Woolworths’ food range and draws on more than 20 years of Woolworths TASTE recipes, generating meal ideas based on ingredients, dietary preferences, household size or a specific occasion. It is designed to parse natural language, so a customer can ask for something like a quick family dinner, a vegetarian meal, lunchbox ideas or a recipe using whatever is already sitting in the fridge, and get suggestions back in context. According to Woolworths, those recommendations are pulled from its recipe database and weighted toward locally available ingredients and seasonal relevance.
The part that turns this from a recipe search into a business move is what happens next. Once a customer settles on a recipe, the ingredients can be dropped straight into a Woolies DASH shopping basket, and users can trim the list to exclude items they already have at home. The pitch is convenience, but the mechanism is a fairly direct line from “what should I cook” to “here is your order,” which is the kind of loop grocery retailers have wanted to close for years.
Jose Rodrigues, group data and AI officer at Woolworths, said the tool is meant to simplify meal planning by letting customers describe what they need in plain language instead of digging through multiple categories. He framed the approach as a deliberately cautious one, with the company developing the technology responsibly, testing it through a phased rollout and improving it on customer feedback rather than shipping everything at once. Over time, Rodrigues said, My Woolies Chef could stretch into more personalised meal planning, smarter shopping lists and budget-conscious recommendations, the last of which would land well in an environment where grocery bills are a live source of household stress.
Woolworths is not moving into empty territory here. The launch puts it alongside a growing cluster of South African grocery retailers pouring resources into AI to sharpen the shopping experience. Shoprite Group has already added AI-powered features to its Checkers Sixty60 app, including personalised recommendations and smarter search, while Pick n Pay has expanded its own use of AI and digital tools across customer engagement and its Pick n Pay asap! delivery app. The competitive subtext is hard to miss: the retailer that best links content, convenience and checkout inside a single app stands to keep customers from wandering to a rival’s.
