Grocery shopping has never been a swipe-right kind of activity, which is exactly the habit Checkers is betting it can change. Three months ago its Sixty60 delivery app added Pixie, an assistant its maker likens to Tinder for groceries, learning your past purchases and pre-loading a basket you accept with a flick of the thumb. This week Shoprite said 98% of the app's paying members have already used it.
A basket that fills itself
Pixie is available to Sixty60's Xtra Savings Plus members, the paid tier, and predicts what individual shoppers need based on what they have bought before. It was built in-house by ShopriteX, the group's digital innovation hub of data scientists and machine-learning engineers. According to Shoprite, customers have swiped more than four million products into their baskets since April, and the tool has pushed order values above the usual average. The retailer points to its keenest user, who it says added 730 products worth R36 236, and a shopper who filled a R1 500 order in 15 seconds that arrived 31 minutes later. Shoprite calls it one of the fastest-adopted features in Sixty60's history, though it is worth noting these are the company's own figures, which have not been independently verified.
The grocery AI race heats up
TechCentral called the release the first hard adoption data for an AI shopping assistant in South African retail. The claims land barely a week after Pick n Pay launched Penny, a rival assistant built on Google's Gemini technology that takes instructions by voice, text or photo in isiZulu, Afrikaans and English. The two take different routes to the same trolley: Penny opens with conversation, while Pixie leans on loyalty data to guess what you are about to run out of. For now Sixty60 holds the lead it has built, logging R11.9-billion in sales in the six months to December 2025 from about 875 stores.
Innovation chief Neil Schreuder frames Pixie as AI that removes friction rather than adds noise, every unnecessary tap and scroll stripped from the shop. Whether shoppers keep swiping once the novelty fades is the real test the adoption numbers cannot yet answer.
