Wilder Market & Kitchen: The Future of Food Retail Is Not Another Grocery Store. It Is the End of Channel Silos

 

What if the future of food retail is not a better grocery store, a more convenient restaurant or another premium prepared-foods concept—but a destination that combines the best of all three, that’s what Steven Johnson, Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions® wants you to start thinking about.

And what if consumers are already telling the food industry that separating grocery shopping from restaurant-quality meals, ingredient transparency, convenience and hospitality is an outdated way to organize a business?

That is the consumer challenge behind Wilder Market & Kitchen, the new Miami concept backed by Major Food Group. Scheduled to debut in fall 2026, Wilder combines a neighborhood market, café, made-to-order sandwiches, hot and cold prepared foods, and a patio designed to encourage customers to stay awhile—or take dinner home.

The ambition is bigger than putting a restaurant inside a grocery store. Founder and CEO Danielle Axman wants to create a neighborhood destination where ingredient integrity, sustainability, culinary quality and hospitality work together.

For the Grocerant Guru®, that is a development worth watching. Food retail and foodservice are not competing in separate consumer universes. They are competing for the same stomachs, wallets, meal occasions and increasingly limited time.

Consumers do not shop in channel silos. They shop for solutions.

Meet Danielle Axman: The consumer problem behind Wilder

Axman's background offers an important clue to Wilder's positioning. Reporting on the launch identifies her as a former member of the founding team behind BABE Rosé, the canned-wine brand, and a former chief of staff at SoulCycle. Her experience spans consumer products, brand building and experience-driven hospitality rather than the traditional grocery-store operating ladder.

The idea for Wilder emerged after she became a mother. Axman found herself spending considerable time researching ingredients, interpreting labels and investigating where food came from. Even after doing that work, she often struggled to find products that met her standards and tasted good.

Her proposed answer was straightforward: create one place where consumers could buy groceries, pick up a prepared meal and feel more confident about what they were purchasing, without having to do all the research themselves.

That origin story matters because it starts with a consumer frustration rather than a traditional retail category.

Axman is not simply asking shoppers to buy more organic produce or pay a premium for a prepared meal. The broader proposition is to reduce the effort required to make food decisions while delivering a better eating experience.

The commercial challenge will be converting that proposition into a repeatable routine. A compelling origin story may earn a first visit. Consistent food quality, credible sourcing, convenience, appropriate prices and a dependable experience must earn the second, third and fiftieth.

Major Food Group brings culinary credibility—and a different growth proposition

Wilder's founding investor and strategic adviser is Major Food Group, the hospitality company founded by Mario Carbone, Rich Torrisi and Jeff Zalaznick.

The group is associated with prominent concepts including CARBONE, Sadelle's and The Grill, alongside a broader portfolio of restaurants, private clubs, bars and hotels. Its experience centers on distinctive food, recognizable brands, hospitality and creating destinations that customers want to revisit. 

Wilder represents a meaningful extension of that playbook. Rather than opening another restaurant, club or hotel, Major Food Group is backing a business designed to combine everyday grocery needs with prepared meals and neighborhood hospitality.

That shift changes the frequency equation.

A celebrated restaurant may depend on customers making a special occasion out of a visit. A neighborhood market can compete for coffee in the morning, lunch, a snack, an ingredient for tonight's dinner and a ready-to-eat meal on the way home.

The opportunity is to turn culinary credibility into more frequent, everyday consumer interactions.

But there is an important distinction: a Michelin-associated culinary pedigree does not automatically make a grocery business successful. Grocery requires disciplined purchasing, inventory management, fresh-food execution, labor productivity, waste control and pricing that supports repeat purchasing.

Major Food Group brings a potentially valuable hospitality perspective. Wilder must demonstrate that this perspective can work at neighborhood-market frequency and economics.

The Wilder Standard: Ingredient integrity must become a consumer benefit

Wilder's proposed standards are intended to guide what the business sells and serves, how ingredients are sourced and how decisions account for environmental health, labor practices and animal welfare.

The company has identified the Environmental Working Group (EWG) as an input into its standards and named prospective farm and producer relationships including Paradise Farms, Glaser Organic Farms and White Oak Pastures.

The distinction is important: Wilder is attempting to make sourcing standards part of the operating proposition, rather than leaving shoppers to evaluate every package independently.

Ingredient transparency is not an imaginary consumer issue. The International Food Information Council's 2025 Food & Health Survey continued its long-running examination of how Americans understand food, ingredients and food safety. Its national survey program included 3,000 U.S. consumers.

EWG's 2026 Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce, meanwhile, analyzed U.S. Department of Agriculture testing data and reported pesticide residues in 75% of conventionally grown produce samples examined. That is a finding about the samples and methodology used in that analysis—not proof that every residue creates a health risk or that conventional produce is unsafe. 

For Wilder, the strategic opportunity is to make sourcing information easier to understand and act on.

The standard must also be credible. Shoppers should be able to distinguish verified sourcing claims, specific production practices, supplier commitments and broader sustainability aspirations. Ingredient integrity should be explained clearly, not used as a vague premium-price justification.

And here is the Grocerant Guru's test: Does Wilder make it easier for a consumer to eat well, enjoy the food and feel confident about the purchase—or does it simply make shopping more expensive?

The winning proposition has to deliver both trust and taste. If the food is not delicious, transparent sourcing alone will not create a durable food brand.

Elevate Your Brand with Expert Insights

For corporate presentations, regional chain strategies, educational forums, or keynote speaking, Steven Johnson, the Grocerant Guru®, delivers actionable insights that fuel success.

With deep experience in restaurant operations, brand positioning, and strategic consulting, Steven provides valuable takeaways that inspire and drive results.

Visit GrocerantGuru.com or FoodserviceSolutions.US Call 1-253-759-7869

When Bots Do the Buying, Who Gets the Advertising Dollar?

 

The grocery store, C-store and restaurant may still own the customer relationship—but increasingly, the AI agent may own the decision. That changes the economics of food advertising according to Steven Johnson Grocerant Guru® at Tacoma, WA based Foodservice Solutions®.

For decades, food marketers have understood a simple proposition: get in front of the consumer at the right moment, create desire, influence the choice and convert that choice into a purchase.

Retailers learned to monetize that proposition through circulars, endcaps, displays, loyalty programs, email, apps, sponsored search and, most recently, retail media networks.

Now comes the uncomfortable question:

What happens to the advertising business when the shopper stops doing the shopping?

That is the question being raised by Instacart's announcement that Meta's new Muse AI agent will connect to Instacart's grocery infrastructure. Instacart already has connectors involving ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Google's AI Mode. Its own Clementine AI assistant can turn a prompt such as “high-protein dinners for two” into a shoppable cart based on real-time store inventory.

This isn't simply another digital-shopping feature.

It is a potential change in who makes the purchase decision.

And that should make every grocery CEO, C-store CEO, restaurant CEO and CPG marketing executive ask a very different question:

If the bot is making the buying decision, who is the retailer selling advertising to?

 

The grocery industry has spent billions building the advertising machine

The retail media opportunity is enormous.

Instacart says its advertising ecosystem now reaches 55+ million consumers, more than 100,000 storefronts, 2,200+ retail banners and 310+ retail media networks and marketplaces.

GeekWire has been documenting the evolution of this business for years.

In 2022, GeekWire reported on Seattle-based grocery technology company Swiftly, which helped brick-and-mortar grocers collect customer data and monetize it through advertising. At that time, Swiftly said more than 80% of retail transactions still occurred in physical stores and roughly 90% of grocery shopping took place in brick-and-mortar stores rather than through an app or browser.

Then the advertising opportunity expanded beyond the store.

GeekWire reported in 2024 that Seattle-area adtech company Symbiosys was targeting a retail-media market estimated at $45 billion, helping retailers sell advertising beyond their own websites and apps.

And in 2025, GeekWire reported that DoorDash's advertising business had crossed a $1 billion annualized revenue rate, while its acquisition of Symbiosys was intended to expand off-platform advertising capabilities for brands and restaurants.

So the food industry has been building something extremely valuable:

First-party data + consumer intent + media inventory + transaction data + closed-loop measurement.

But AI agents introduce a new intermediary between the brand and the buyer.

 

The advertising problem: The bot doesn't need to be persuaded

This is where the food industry needs to rethink the word advertising.

A human shopper might see:

TYSON CHICKEN — $5.99

and think:

"That's a good deal. I'll buy Tyson."

An AI agent may instead process:

·       price

·       package size

·       nutrition

·       dietary requirements

·       availability

·       promotions

·       previous purchases

·       delivery time

·       retailer

·       product ratings

·       household preferences

·       substitution rules

and then select the product.

That is a fundamentally different purchasing environment.

Deloitte describes the emerging “algorithmic shelf” as an environment in which AI agents increasingly analyze data and verifiable claims rather than responding to traditional marketing persuasion. Deloitte reported in June 2026 that 55% of consumers were starting shopping journeys through large language models, according to its cited research.

Circana reported another important 2026 data point: 25% of consumers surveyed had used an AI recommendation to purchase a CPG product.

And Deloitte's 2026 retail outlook says AI-chat referrals already account for 15%–20% of total referrals for some retailers, while some industry estimates suggest AI agents could handle as much as 25% of global e-commerce sales by 2030.

The direction is unmistakable:

The consumer may increasingly tell the machine what they want—and let the machine figure out what to buy.

 

Then comes Meta's Muse problem

Meta says Muse is a personal AI agent designed to actually perform tasks, including opening browsers, filling out forms and completing purchases with user approval.

But here is the important distinction.

Meta says Muse does not share a person's conversations or data in its virtual machine with Meta's advertising systems.

That doesn't mean advertising disappears from the economy.

It means something potentially more important:

The agent's purchasing decision is not necessarily another conventional advertising impression.

That creates a strategic question for retail media.

Suppose a consumer tells Muse:

“Order chicken breasts, vegetables and something easy for dinner tonight for under $25.”

The old advertising model says:

Show Tyson.

The agentic-commerce model says:

Find the product that best satisfies the consumer's criteria.

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

 

So why would Tyson advertise on Kroger?

This is where the industry needs to separate retail media from AI-mediated commerce.

Tyson might still have excellent reasons to advertise on a retailer's platform.

The advertising can:

1.       Reach human shoppers before they delegate the purchase.

2.       Build brand awareness.

3.       Influence a consumer's future preferences.

4.       Promote a new product.

5.       Drive trial.

6.       Communicate price or promotion.

7.       Reach shoppers inside a retailer's physical and digital ecosystem.

8.       Produce measurable sales attribution.

But if an AI agent increasingly determines which chicken goes into the basket, the value proposition of the ad changes.

The question becomes:

Is Tyson paying Kroger to persuade the consumer—or paying Kroger to make Tyson more visible and machine-readable inside an increasingly algorithmic marketplace?

That is a much bigger strategic question.

 

What about Tastykake on Wawa?

The same issue appears in convenience stores.

Wawa has enormous foodservice traffic, beverage traffic and impulse-purchase occasions.

A traditional consumer sees:

Tastykake → display → recognition → craving → purchase.

That is classic food marketing.

But an AI agent doesn't walk through the Wawa store experiencing the smell of coffee, seeing the pastry case and remembering childhood.

The agent receives a request.

“Get me breakfast and a snack.”

Now the competitive battlefield can become:

price + availability + preference + nutrition + convenience + previous purchase behavior + product data.

That doesn't eliminate the value of the Tastykake brand.

It potentially changes where the brand must establish its value.

 

And Budweiser on TGI Fridays?

This example illustrates another important distinction.

Restaurants are not merely grocery shelves.

A restaurant has:

·       atmosphere

·       social interaction

·       menu engineering

·       server recommendations

·       food photography

·       smell

·       presentation

·       entertainment

·       occasions

·       group behavior

·       impulse purchases

A Budweiser sponsorship, promotion or menu placement at a restaurant can influence a social occasion, not simply a product search.

That makes restaurants potentially different from grocery retail.

But even restaurants are moving toward digital ordering, loyalty, delivery, mobile ordering and AI-assisted discovery.

DoorDash's advertising expansion demonstrates how foodservice platforms are already becoming media businesses as well as transaction businesses.

The restaurant of the future may therefore have two customers:

the human customer—and the algorithm that helps determine what the human orders.

 

The biggest mistake would be killing advertising too early

Here is where the Grocerant Guru® sees an important distinction.

AI does not make advertising irrelevant.

It makes bad advertising less relevant.

There is a difference.

If the consumer says:

“I want something inexpensive, high-protein, ready in 10 minutes and under 600 calories.”

the food company that has the best machine-readable product information, price/value proposition, availability, nutrition information and verified attributes may have an advantage.

Deloitte calls this competition for the “algorithmic shelf.”

That means the next generation of food marketing may require two strategies:

Marketing to people

Brand + emotion + craving + experience + value

and

Marketing to machines

Data + attributes + price + availability + relevance + proof

The winning food marketer may need both.

 

Retail media must prove what it is actually selling

Retailers should be asking a harder question than:

“How much advertising revenue can we generate?”

They should ask:

“What decision are we influencing?”

That distinction becomes critical.

If an advertisement appears on Kroger's website and a human sees it, that is one type of value.

If an AI agent bypasses the ad and directly creates a basket from inventory, the retailer may still generate transaction revenue—but the advertising impression becomes less important.

And that could eventually put pressure on retail-media economics.

Instacart itself is already preparing for this transition. Its three-layer AI strategy includes:

·       Clementine, its native AI shopping experience;

·       Cart Assistant, which retailers can put on their own websites and apps;

·       Connectors, which allow outside AI platforms to access Instacart's grocery infrastructure.

At the same time, Instacart is aggressively expanding its advertising ecosystem. It reported more than $1 billion in advertising and other revenue in 2025.

That juxtaposition is fascinating:

The company is simultaneously building the advertising business and the technology that could help consumers shop without traditional browsing.

That is not necessarily a contradiction.

It may be the beginning of the next retail model.

 

The Grocerant opportunity: Stop thinking in silos

The Grocerant Niche has always challenged the industry's artificial boundaries.

Consumers don't necessarily think:

Grocery.

Restaurant.

C-store.

Delivery.

Retail media.

They think:

“What's for dinner?”

And increasingly they may tell an AI agent:

“Figure it out.”

That creates a massive opportunity for grocery stores, C-stores and restaurants.

The future competitive advantage may not simply be having the biggest advertising network.

It may be having the best answer to the consumer's prompt.

That means a grocery store needs to know:

·       what is available right now;

·       what is fresh;

·       what is ready-to-eat;

·       what is heat-and-eat;

·       what can be bundled;

·       what is on promotion;

·       what fits the consumer's budget;

·       what complements another product;

·       what can be delivered;

·       and what can solve the consumer's meal problem.

That's Grocerant thinking.

 

Mix-and-Match Meal Component Bundling becomes AI-ready

This is where Mix-and-Match Meal Component Bundling becomes even more important.

A human might see:

rotisserie chicken + salad + bread + dessert

and construct a meal.

An AI agent can potentially do the same thing—provided the retailer's data infrastructure understands the relationships among those products.

That creates an interesting shift:

Yesterday's merchandising strategy becomes tomorrow's machine-readable meal architecture.

The retailer isn't simply selling four products.

It is selling:

Dinner.

And that is a much more valuable proposition.

 

The new food advertising equation

The old equation was essentially:

Attention → Advertising → Desire → Purchase

The emerging equation could be:

Intent → AI interpretation → Product comparison → Recommendation → Purchase

Advertising doesn't necessarily disappear.

But its location—and its job—changes.

The food marketer may increasingly have to influence the inputs that AI uses to make decisions, while simultaneously maintaining enough human brand equity that consumers will recognize, request or approve the recommendation.

That's a very different marketing challenge.

And it could make product data, value and availability the new hand-held marketing.

 

Three Insights from the Grocerant Guru®

1. The advertising impression is not the purchase decision.

Retailers have spent years monetizing the consumer's attention. AI agents may increasingly monetize the consumer's intent instead.

The next retail-media question isn't simply “Did someone see the ad?”

It is:

“Did the product get selected?”

2. The algorithmic shelf is becoming as important as the physical shelf.

Tyson can win the physical shelf with packaging, placement and promotion.

Tastykake can win the impulse occasion with visibility.

Budweiser can win a social occasion with restaurant merchandising.

But the AI shelf requires something different:

relevance, value, availability and verifiable product information.

The brands that prepare their data for AI may discover that machine visibility becomes a new form of shelf placement.

3. The Grocerant winner will sell the solution—not the silo.

The consumer doesn't care whether dinner originated in the grocery store, C-store, restaurant, deli or delivery platform.

The consumer wants Price + Quality + Social + Portability = Value.

And increasingly, the consumer may simply tell an AI:

“What's the best dinner for me tonight?”

The retailer, restaurant, C-store and food brand that can provide the best answer—not merely the loudest advertisement—may be building the next generation of food marketing.

That's the Grocerant Guru® view: In an AI-powered food world, the most valuable media may not be the advertisement the consumer sees. It may be the product the algorithm chooses.

Tap into the Foodservice Solutions® team for greater understanding of New Electricity or for a Grocerant Program Assessment, Grocerant ScoreCard, or for product positioning or placement assistance, or call our Grocerant Guru®.  Since 1991 www.FoodserviceSolutions.us  of Tacoma, WA has been the global leader in the Grocerant niche. Contact: Steve@FoodserviceSolutions.us or 253-759-7869

 

Sources: GeekWire, Meta, Instacart, Circana and Deloitte, with 2022–2026 data and reporting cited above.