Breez AI, an AI shopping platform built for regional and independent grocers, has announced another wave of retailer adoption led by several companies headquartered in the Midwest, including Brothers Market (Iowa), Balls Food Stores and Price Chopper Enterprises (Kansas) and PFS Brands (Missouri).
Also joining the retailer network is Oklahoma City-based HAC Inc., operating as Homeland. Combined with a rollout across 170 Harps Food Stores locations announced earlier, Breez AI is on track to more than quadruple its active store count by August.
Breez AI’s shopping assistant lets shoppers plan personalized meals, build complete baskets and get answers across the grocery journey inside the retailer’s own brand, connected to the retailer’s existing commerce, loyalty and fulfillment systems.
The company serves no national chains and is owned in part by the channel it serves, with shareholders including Kansas City, Kansas-based Associated Wholesale Grocers and grocery operators who deploy the platform.
Loyalty shoppers using Breez AI’s shopping assistant now spend, on average, 20 percent more than loyalty shoppers who do not use it, according to the company. Year-over-year spending among those shoppers also has grown at nearly twice the rate of non-users.
The new retailer deployments will launch on Breez AI’s new 2.0 platform, which extends beyond meal planning to broader culinary features.
Along with a redesigned user experience, deeper personalization and a conversational shopping assistant with dynamic prompts, the platform now helps shoppers pair recipes with complementary wines and cocktails.
Additional enhancements include contextual advertising, coupon integration, one-click ordering, nutritional analysis with meal health scores, cooking guidance, household and pantry modes and multilingual support beginning with Spanish. A full product announcement is planned for later this summer.
“The battle for grocery loyalty is increasingly won before shoppers ever enter the store,” said Tal Zlotnitsky, founder and CEO of Breez AI. “Whoever owns the AI a shopper talks to, owns the customer relationship. A grocer’s name on the screen doesn’t settle who owns the AI behind it.
“Independent grocers need an AI shopping assistant that is not owned by someone competing for their shoppers or powering the national chains they compete against. That is the decision independent operators keep making, including the six we’re announcing today, and we’re grateful for the confidence they’ve placed in us.”
Each retailer deploying Breez AI brings the platform to market under its own consumer-facing brand while maintaining ownership of customer relationships, first-party shopper insights, merchandising strategy and brand identity.
Homeland will introduce the solution as Homeland Pantry+, Balls Food Stores’ Hen House division will use the name Culinary Compass and PFS Brands’ banner Moser’s Foods will launch Moser’s Meal Map.
Brothers Market, Price Chopper Enterprises, Tietgen’s Food Stores (another PFS banner) and Harps Food Stores all have chosen SmartMeals, the consumer-facing brand introduced by AWG and now deployed across more than 70 of its affiliated store brands.
“It was clear to us that we needed to run toward agentic AI. The only question was who we should do it with,” said Ryan Campbell, president of Balls Food Stores.
“Choosing to partner with [Breez AI Board Chairman] David Smith, Tal and the team … ended up being an easy call. They understand the challenges and opportunities facing independent grocers as well as anyone, and they built their solution specifically for our channel.
“The commitment they have already shown to working with us and other independents to make agentic AI work for our stores and our customers has us really fired up about what we can accomplish together.”