Schnucks’ new health-tracking AI assistant is a model for other retailers

AI Strategies // July 27, 2026 Schnucks’ new health-tracking AI assistant is a model for other retailers By Mitchell Parton Ivy Liu St. Louis-based regional grocer Schnucks just launched a new AI assistant, but behind it is a larger idea around how agents could eventually take over the shopping process and help people eat healthier.

Schnucks, which operates 112 grocery stores in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, announced its partnership with the Boston-based agentic commerce tech company VitalityIP on July 22. Through this deal, it plans to launch an AI shopping assistant for nutrition guidance, meal ideas and product recommendations.

It will be found in the Schnucks Rewards app and Schnucks’ website later this summer. VitalityIP was quietly co-founded last year by Michael Connor, its chief technology officer, who previously was a global generative AI product manager at Amazon Web Services and before that worked at Coca-Cola for 10 years.

More centrally to the startup’s health priorities, the other co-founder is Sarah Hoit, who also serves as chairman of the Global Brain Health Initiative by Social Impact Partners and previously was chief social impact officer at BioVie, which develops therapies for the treatment of neurodegenerative conditions and advanced liver disease.

The grocer and startup co-developed the technology behind the assistant using customer and store inventory data as well as VitalityIP’s AI and proprietary database of health insights and ingredient-level product data. Schnucks is the first to debut VitalityIP’s platform, but it was designed for white-label integration by retailers nationwide.

Executives at both Schnucks and VitalityIP told Modern Retail that the platform is just the beginning of a transition from customer-initiated shopping to one in which AI agents take control of people’s eating habits.

“At some point, you’re going to have an agent that is going to be shopping for you,” said Tom Henry, chief data and information officer for Schnucks. “It’s going to know your palate profile … and this is the basket you want to purchase, and it’s going to shop for you. That is coming.”

Hoit said her organization’s vision is to impact global health by influencing eating habits. “We can get people off of diabetes drugs in 10 to 12 weeks if they change their diet; it has profound implications,” Hoit said.

“To me, this isn’t one grocery chain deciding to do something; this is a very large story that is going to affect everyone, and we’re just in this moment where it can happen.” That begins with collecting data on individuals’ health conditions and dietary needs or preferences.

Henry said he wanted Schnucks’ assistant to leverage the grocer’s knowledge of shopping behavior to cater to each individual’s palate, offering different ways to prepare foods that align with their palate profile and budget.

It “takes the abrasion out of planning meals that meet your family’s nutritional needs and actually provides a little bit of … enjoyment in conducting the activity,” he said. People can put in their profile whether they like or dislike something or have a specific allergy.

Products they can’t or won’t eat will not be recommended to them, and those preferences carry through to any future conversations. The assistant can also tell them what would pair well with certain dishes.

“It aligns its recipes, and ultimately the actual baskets that you’re going to develop, to your dietary needs or desires, allowing you to go and cook these meals [that incorporate] food that you like,” Henry said. “We wanted it to be much more than just a search bar where you say, ‘Tell me about these products.’”

VitalityIP takes into account where the shoppers are, where they live, what they have access to and what their cost parameters are, as well as their health conditions, allergies and the needs of their family members — like if someone’s daughter has a medical condition or their dad has heart disease.

It can also give recommendations tailored to people on diabetes or GLP-1 medications. Shoppers can delete conditions from their profile if they no longer want those recommendations. “Every consumer has something in their family they’re trying to solve,” Hoit said.

“We’ve mapped back to every [International Classification of Diseases] code, every disease state. We want to have recipes that can honor what that family is dealing with.” The assistant has navigation features within the store — so people can ask it, “Where’s the ketchup?” and it will tell them what aisle it is in.

Schnucks has robots that traverse the stores so the company knows where every item in every store on every shelf is. The assistant also has access to Schnucks’ library of digital offers, coupons and pe