By Alice Chambers |
When customers open the Albert Heijn app today, they’re greeted by a helpful AI assistant named Steijn. Built using Microsoft Azure AI Foundry and powered by Azure OpenAI in Foundry Models, Steijn is more than a chatbot; it is a smart cooking and shopping companion.
Stejin has access to over 20,000 Albert Heijn recipes, complete with nutritional information and cooking tips like how to cut an avocado, and is designed to offer tailored suggestions to customers. The assistant can also recommend meals based on photos of the ingredients customers already have at home, helping them to reduce waste by cooking more creatively.
This innovative solution is the latest digital step forward for Albert Heijn, a 138-year-old Dutch grocery chain that operates 1,200 stores and serves five million weekly customers across the Netherlands.
The retailer wanted to offer customers an experience that went beyond shopping with a digital helper that could support their daily meal decisions in a fast and personalised way. The aim was to seamlessly integrate the AI assistant into the existing Albert Heijn app so customers could rely on it to reduce stress, save time and support healthier habits.
“Throughout the entire food chain at Albert Heijn, we want to reduce food waste by 50 per cent by 2030,” says Sjoerd Holleman, senior vice president of strategy, product and analytics at Albert Heijn. “We’re doing everything we can on that.”
The implementation of the AI assistant presented both technical and creative challenges. The foundation for Steijn came from Allderhande – Albert Heijn’s long-running food magazine – which provided an archive of recipes to inform the AI.
“The tools of Microsoft gave us the opportunity to really build Steijn with a small team in a short amount of time,” says Norman van Ameyden, a product manager at Albert Heijn who focuses on digital product innovation.
Using the chat playground in the Azure AI Foundry portal, Van Ameyden’s team rapidly tested different versions of the assistant. Azure AI Foundry is a platform designed to help developers and businesses create, customise and manage AI applications and agents at scale with relative ease.
“We wanted to make sure we can do quick proofs of concept and experiments, and that really helped us, because we did a lot of testing just before we went to production,” says Van Ameyden. “And Azure AI Foundry was perfect for that.”
Security was another essential part of the implementation. All information exchanged with Steijn is anonymised and deleted every 30 days. The app also uses Azure AI Content Safety to monitor for harmful or inappropriate content, helping ensure a safe and trustworthy experience for users.
By taking this approach, Albert Heijn has delivered a unique blend of convenience, customisation and care.
“We developed Steijn to answer that key question, ‘What is for dinner tonight?’,” says Holleman. “If you have two friends coming over who eat gluten-free, or you want to eat vegetarian, and you don’t want to be in the kitchen more than 20 minutes. Steijn will give you multiple recipe suggestions and really help you with answering that question.”
The app now supports over five million users, many of whom also use it in-store via the built-in scanner function. Shoppers can scan items as they go, then check out using self-service pay stations so no waiting in line required.
By combining AI-powered meal planning with smart in-store convenience, Albert Heijn’s app is saving customers an estimated 90 minutes to two hours a week. Steijn not only reduces time spent on shopping and planning, but also encourages healthier and more diverse eating habits, demonstrating how impactful a thoughtfully designed AI assistant can be.
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