Kroger Builds Thanksgiving From Photos

CINCINNATI—Kroger is pairing an AI Shopping Assistant that builds carts from photo uploads, recipe URLs and typed lists with an expanded ready-to-heat Thanksgiving assortment, Grocery CPG reported. The tool can scale ingredients by household size and flag dietary swaps. Same-day delivery in as little as 30 minutes is available chainwide, with DoorDash, Instacart and Uber Eats as on-demand options.

On the perimeter, the retailer is merchandising single-slice bakery pies, fully cooked sliced turkey breast and single-serve sides as a "Feast for a Few" for smaller households. Kroger serves more than 11 million customers daily across its banners, the report said.

"I uploaded my grandmother's card," said fictional shopper Evan Ruiz of Louisville. "The assistant added thyme I do not own and removed the joke about Uncle Ray. The cart was otherwise faithful." He checked out curbside. The pie was whole. He had asked for a slice. The assistant, he said, scaled up for optimism.

for smaller households. Kroger serves more than 11 million customers daily across its banners, the report said.

Mary Ellen Adcock, Kroger's chief merchant and marketing officer, framed the push around reducing kitchen stress. Grocery CPG noted the commercial logic runs both ways: pre-loaded digital carts tend to lift average order value and cut substitutions on pickup and delivery during peak weeks.

Marjorie Pell stood in a fictional prepared-foods case and timed how long a single-slice pie waited for a friend. Four minutes. No friend arrived. She wrote "Feast for a Few" beside the holiday candy note already crowding Ledger page 40's margins and moved on before the pie felt observed.

A fictional deli clerk, Sam Ortiz, said the adjacency of heat-and-eat protein next to single-serve sides is the real planogram joke. "We used to hide the sides three departments away," Ortiz said. "Now they sit together like they were invited."

Pell's kicker for the desk: Thanksgiving remains a meal. The cart is only the guest list.

Marjorie Pell has worked or covered American stores for 40 years and still knows where the paper towels are. More from Marjorie Pell ›

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Terms in this story: AOV · CPG · Planogram