Amazon’s Alexa+ Pushes Deeper Into Grocery Shopping | Fast Five Shorts

Amazon has integrated instant meal shopping into its browser based Alexa model.

According to chainstorage, the latest version of the Amazon Alexa voice enabled device complete with meal planning and shopping features is available via browser.

Initially introduced in February 2025, Alexa combines more than 70 large language models and agentic capabilities supported by the Amazon Bedrock platform on Amazon Web Services.

Functionality includes end to end meal planning and customers can also ask Alexa for a full week's menu and have a week breakfast, lunch and dinner options.

With their personal preferences taken into account.

Customers can then ask Alexa to add every recommended item that they need to their Amazon fresher Whole Foods Market cart ready to order.

In addition, users can drop a recipe link into Alexa and ask it to customize the recipe to their specific dietary restrictions and add it to to their recipe library.

Shoppers can then convert the full recipe into ingredients and have them added to their shopping list.

Chris, are you buying or selling the new Alexa plus browser edition for meal planning?

And you actually tried this?

It sounds like so I want to hear what your thoughts are.

I did, I did, I did.

I'm one of the new early users.

It says, it says hey, welcome, you're a new early user.

It's a great feeling to have this morning that, that I received as trying it out.

Yeah, I actually, it's, it's actually pretty darn slick and I'm actually buy.

To answer your question, I'm buying this and it actually puts some gloss on Amazon's what I would call to date lackluster grocery strategy.

And number one, I find it's really interesting that Amazon is launching this and immediately talking about its use for meal planning like that's what they're talking about.

That's crazy when you stop and think about it.

That tells me Amazon is really, really jonesing to find growth out of grocery.

They are 100% want that business.

Number two, Alexa has an installed user base and the Alexa owners like I think of, like our old buddy Carter Jensen used to be on the show a long time ago.

They're probably likely the first adopters for this type of tech.

So that is also a very good thing.

Number three, no one knows which agentic AI interface for grocery shopping will win out and Amazon stands as good a chance as any to win that battle in my opinion, even though ChatGPT may have the early lead in terms of like brand recognition.

So the, the other part I like about this, the combination of Whole Foods, Amazon, Amazon's marketplace partners does mean, it does mean if you want to shop this way you can complete your entire weekly grocery trip through an interface like this.

And like I said, I tried it out this morning.

I did give me five Paleo breakfast menu options for a week.

It did it and then I said I want to Prepare them in 10 minutes or less because I don't want to do the work.

It gave me more options.

I didn't have time to go and order it and see, and trial it out and see how many of the items can come directly from Amazon from the recipe.

But hey, it's got me intrigued and I'm interested in it.

So yeah, I'm, I'm buying this one.

Yeah, I think I agree.

I mean I get why Amazon is doing this for all the reasons that you shared there.

They're really trying to continue to build out the Amazon ecosystem similar to.

It reminds me of now of like how Apple, the Apple ecosystem is.

So I like that a lot because I've never been an Alexa fan.

So I've always, I've always kind of kept it outside.

It didn't seem to have enough use or enough use cases for me to actually bite down, bite the bullet and get one.

But you know, the problem that I have with this is that you're still reliant on two retailers for your groceries.

And that's the problem that I have.

Like I don't know that one.

You know, I can go to Chatbots and get, put in the same query and get a whole list of different options I can get.

Retailers across the board are not limited to just Amazon Fresh Delivery and, and Whole Foods.

And I think that there's still a price price perception problem with Whole Foods when I'm ordering Paleo breakfast, things like those products are expensive.

So I think, you know, without quality being significant enough to me and with the, the price perception that I'm going to be paying more for my products delivered from Whole Foods even though I can get them in one cart.

I think my best move as a consumer is to independent source like ChatGPT type in the same query, have those items added to my cart, check out through, you know, Walmart Chat GPT.

Assuming they add groceries, which I guess that that's something that they haven't done right now.

But check out and see, do a price comparison and say where, where in all of my grocery universe can I get this list of ingredients for the best price possible and then be able to make a decision versus just being limited to what's within the Amazon and Whole Foods product environment?

Yeah, and yeah, it's a great question and the question comes down to how many people are like you versus how many people are just okay with getting products they can trust enough from Amazon and then supplementing the higher priced products they want to from Whole Foods and.

And the other options too.

Let's not forget Amazon has a marketplace of grocers available to it that are selling through the platform.

We've always asked why they're doing that.

I don't really understand that, but they do.

And we're going to talk.

You know, there's quite a few of them that are out there that are part of that stable, so it's wild.