Grocery shopping used to be fun. You’d stroll through the aisles with a huge cart, scan the shelves, stumble on new products, and throw in things you didn’t plan on buying simply because they looked interesting and you want to try them. That dopamine-fueled sense of discovery disappears online. Digital grocery journeys bury you in siloed categories you will never have time to explore, or they keep pushing the same items you bought last month. Great, they helped you remember mustard and toothpaste. They rarely surface the exciting, relevant products you would actually want to try like rosemary keto crackers. It’s not just a bad shopping experience. It’s a massive amount of lost AOV.
Online grocery and retail pharmacy systems are built around functional metadata, reorders, and category navigation, none of which come close to capturing real taste. Preference in grocery is never just functional. Dietary needs matter, but they sit alongside brand attachment, packaging cues, cultural background, specific palate preferences, lifestyle aspirations, and the emotional story a product tells. Two people who both want almond milk will choose entirely different ones depending on their identity, values, psychology, and how the product makes them feel. Grocery catalogs are enormous, constantly changing, and deeply siloed, which means shoppers rarely see the products that would resonate with them most.
Most tools assume shoppers either want to filter by category or reorder what they bought before.
The result is a digital grocery experience that collapses nuance and excludes excitement.
PSYKHE AI models products by their flavor profile, cultural resonance, nutritional positioning, packaging tone, and brand personality, creating precise latent representations that reflect how people actually experience them. We know that the Pellegrino person is the lobster tail person is the Salt & Stone deodorant person, as much as we know that the Old Spice shopper is a t-bone shopper is aBudweiser shopper.
In addition to their staples, shoppers experience novelty, and the sense of exploration that makes grocery shopping enjoyable. They see items they would never have filtered for but are instantly drawn to. Retailers capture higher AOV through better adjacencies and stronger cross-category engagement. And shoppers feel understood, not funneled back into the same stale set of past purchases.
