IGD’s Toby Pickard sat down with Jacques-Edouard Sabatier, CEO and Co-Founder of Jow & Jowzi, to understand what the recent launch of Jowzi means to the food and grocery industry and how agentic AI will transform the way people shop.

What is Jowzi?

Jowzi is an AI agent dedicated to grocery shopping, engineered for real life. Jowzi has been built by Jow, which is a personalised meal planning and grocery shopping app. The advantage of Jowzi being built by Jow is that it is not starting from scratch as an AI chatbot. It is built on top of seven years of grocery shopping, recipe, retailer integration, and checkout technology that Jow has already developed and proven at scale

Jowzi is capable of doing grocery shopping at virtually any supermarket. It handles the entire shopping journey end to end: from meal planning and product search to checkout.

Which retailers are currently enabling Jowzi for shoppers?

Jowzi launched with coverage across 10,000 supermarkets in France and the United States. In France, Jowzi is live with Carrefour, Intermarché, and Chronodrive.

US retail partners will be unveiled at GroceryShop in Las Vegas in September 2026.

What is unique about Jowzi compared with other shopper-facing or retailer-led AI agents?

Three things set Jowzi apart.

First, its architecture. Jowzi features a hybrid design that blends natural conversation with a seamless in-app experience. It doesn't just chat, it executes. The agent handles login, product selection, payment, and delivery slot, all in one flow.

A truly intelligent AI should know us, anticipate our needs, and seamlessly execute them. It's counterintuitive but obvious: the less you have to ‘prompt’, the better the experience.

Second, its depth of integration. Jowzi runs on Jow's technology stack, developed over 7 years, which already connects to e-commerce platforms across more than 10,000 supermarkets without requiring a custom API or any technical development on the retailer's side. As CTO Antoine Maillard puts it: "At a time when many AI players have scaled back their checkout ambitions, and when every CTO is wondering which to partner with and whether MCP is the right model, Jowzi solves all of these problems at once." Its architecture is also LLM-model agnostic.

Third, the demand it generates. Today, 80% of products in a Jowzi cart come directly from agent recommendations rather than manual user searches, a fundamental inversion of how grocery e-commerce has worked until now.

How does Jowzi work?

Jowzi has three core features:

Weekly menu and shoppable recipes

Jowzi recommends a complete, fully personalised weekly menu based on the shopper's tastes, diet, household, and what's in stock at their store. No prompting required. If users want something more specific (more protein, a leftover recipe), they just ask.

The Magic List

Rather than replicating a supermarket's category hierarchy, Jowzi analyses a shopper's purchase history, favourites, and most frequently bought items, then reorganises everything into personalised mini-aisles: by room in the house (bathroom, kitchen, bedroom), by moment of the day (breakfast, snacks, happy hour), or by household member (baby, pet, each child).

Multi-search

Instead of searching product by product, the user lists everything they need in one sentence ("I need organic toothpaste, milk, size 7 diapers, and aluminium foil"). Jowzi extracts keywords and runs every product search in parallel, surfacing the best matches in seconds.

According to an early tester:

It's ten times faster than searching one by one.

As a bonus, Jowzi integrates with WhatsApp: shoppers can ping their family, share and co-create the shopping list, and Jowzi prepares the cart in parallel.

What does Jowzi mean for food and grocery retailers?

Jowzi is a plug-and-play solution: zero custom development, no API integration required on the retailer's side. It plugs into existing e-commerce platforms and handles the full transaction from login to checkout.

More strategically, it addresses one of e-grocery's core profitability problems. Because Jowzi recommends products in batches and drives the shopping journey proactively, retailers can prioritise specific products and return to positive e-commerce margins rather than relying on promotions and discounts to drive conversion.

Nicolas Bommel, EVP of Partnerships at Jow, summarizes it:

Jowzi is the app that drives demand.

What opportunities does it create for branded suppliers?

The traditional retail media model (banners, promoted placements, product-page ads) assumes a shopper is already browsing. Jowzi changes the starting point: the agent recommends, the shopper confirms.

This means brands can win market share through automatic add-to-cart placements, recommendations built into the agent's output, rather than fighting for attention with intrusive formats or constant promotional pressure. The opportunity is to be the recommended product, not just the visible one.