Woolies brings AI food assistant W.Chef into live customer testing

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The live beta marks the first time W.Chef is being used outside Woolworths and represents another step in the retailer's push to integrate artificial intelligence into the customer experience.

Built around more than 20 years of recipes from Woolworths Taste, W.Chef uses AI to respond to everyday food-related prompts, generating personalised meal ideas based on customers' dietary requirements, preferences and occasions.

But its role extends beyond inspiration.

Customers can also ask W.Chef for wine pairings and add multiple ingredients to their shopping basket through a single prompt, connecting meal planning directly to purchasing through Woolies Dash.

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The model effectively brings together three traditionally separate parts of the grocery journey — deciding what to eat, finding the ingredients and completing the shop — within a single digital interaction.

From AI experiment to retail tool

The beta launch gives Woolworths an opportunity to observe how customers actually use the technology in everyday shopping situations, rather than relying solely on development-stage testing.

The retailer plans to use customer feedback and usage insights to refine W.Chef ahead of a broader rollout in the coming months.

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For Woolworths, the development comes as food remains a core part of its customer proposition and as retailers increasingly look at AI not simply as an operational tool, but as a way to make shopping more personalised.

“Food is at the heart of Woolworths and remains our greatest competitive advantage,” says Sam Ngumeni, group CEO of Woolworths.

“As we sharpen our focus on this part of the business, we also have an opportunity to use our digital capabilities more deliberately to make the experience easier, more relevant and more valuable for our customers, and W.Chef is a good example of what that looks like in practice.”

Turning inspiration into a transaction

One of the more significant aspects of W.Chef is its connection to Woolworths' existing commerce ecosystem.

Rather than directing customers to a recipe and leaving them to work out the shopping list themselves, the assistant can translate a meal request into a basket of ingredients.

This creates a potential new route into grocery purchasing, with the customer's initial interaction driven by a need or occasion rather than a specific product.

For example, a customer could ask for a quick weekday meal, a vegetarian dinner or a meal suited to a particular dietary preference, with W.Chef generating options and enabling the relevant ingredients to be added to a basket.

That positions AI as part of the retail journey itself, potentially reducing the friction between discovery and purchase.

Building a personal food companion

W.Chef was developed with support from Microsoft and is built on Microsoft Azure.

“For most people, AI is still something they read about rather than something they use, but W.Chef changes that,” says Vukani Mngxati, CEO of Microsoft South Africa.

“Built on Microsoft Azure, it understands each customer's tastes and dietary needs. This is what AI with real-world impact looks like, and we are proud to partner with Woolworths in making it readily available to South African consumers.”

The current beta is only the starting point for Woolworths' longer-term ambitions for the technology.

The retailer envisions W.Chef evolving into a personal food companion that can help customers plan meals across an entire week, balance nutrition and budget, and make grocery shopping easier.

If that vision is realised, W.Chef could shift AI's role within grocery retail from answering individual questions to becoming an ongoing digital layer connecting meal planning, personalisation and purchasing.

For Woolworths, the test will be whether customers find enough everyday value in that experience to make asking AI what to eat part of their regular shopping routine.