AI is building Thanksgiving carts. Which grocery brands make the basket?

Yesterday Walmart put out its annual Holiday Meal Basket: 26 items, serves 10, $35. Buried in the release is one line that matters more to brand teams than the price. Shoppers can ask Sparky, Walmart’s AI shopping agent, to add the whole basket to their cart.

That makes this the first Thanksgiving where a real share of grocery carts will be assembled by software. Kroger, Albertsons banners like Safeway, Instacart and Walmart all have assistants that turn “dinner for 10” into a list of SKUs. Every slot on that list, the stuffing, the fried onions, the canned pumpkin, goes to a brand. Somebody wins it and everybody else doesn’t.

So we looked at what these assistants actually put in the cart, using what’s been published in the last few weeks.

What did Walmart announce on October 28?#

Per Walmart’s release, the 2026 basket has 17 unique products and 26 total items, 18% more items than last year, at 12% less than those same items cost last year. It’s available through December 24, in stores, online in one click, or through Sparky. Walmart says the program has saved customers more than $350 million since 2022.

The brand split is the part to study. Walmart says the basket includes five national brands. We sorted the 17 products on its list:

Five national brands made it: Butterball, Stove Top, Campbell’s, Jet-Puffed and “JIFFY”. Walmart says four of the five are on rollback. The French fried onions, the canned pumpkin and the pie crusts are all Great Value, a brand Walmart calls the largest food and consumables CPG brand in the U.S.

When a shopper tells Sparky “add the holiday basket,” nobody compares brands. The retailer’s merchandising team already made that choice in a planning meeting months ago. The AI just carries it out.

What happens when the AI builds the cart from scratch?#

Something quite different, at least in one test. On October 16, Grocery Dive senior editor Catherine Douglas Moran gave the same prompt to the Safeway and Kroger assistants: build a basket for a Thanksgiving meal for 10 with a frozen whole turkey, pumpkin pie ingredients and classic sides. Her write-up ran October 22.

Safeway’s assistant returned 51 items. Several were private brands or produce on sale. But it also chose Pillsbury pie crusts, Ocean Spray canned cranberry sauce and French’s Original Crispy Fried Onions, which cost more than the Albertsons store-brand versions on Safeway’s own curated Thanksgiving page. It added a 15-ounce can of Libby’s pure pumpkin and also a 4- to 5-pound pie pumpkin.

Kroger’s assistant started at 23 products. After it shared recipes that didn’t quite match its list, it suggested she ask it to “Add the missing ingredients to my cart.” She did, and ended at 43 items.

One reporter, two prompts, so this is an anecdote and not a market share. Still, the pattern makes sense. A curated basket is a merchant’s decision, and private label usually wins it. An open-ended AI cart is closer to a recommendation, and well-known brand names seem to hold up there. Moran also found the curated pages easier to use than the chatbots. That’s a reminder that the preset basket and the AI cart are both shelves you need to be on.

How many shoppers will actually let AI fill the cart?#

Fewer than will let it advise them, but not a small number. Shopify’s holiday survey of 2,000 U.S. adults, run by Sapio Research in July, shows the drop-off at each step:

Groceries sit at the easy end of that curve. In an Amex Trendex survey released October 6, 52% of U.S. consumers said they’d be comfortable letting an AI agent buy everyday, low-cost items such as household essentials and groceries, against 15% for high-value items like electronics. CivicScience’s first Agentic Retail Report (Oct 15) puts AI shopping adoption at 37% of U.S. adults, with grocery tied with electronics at 32% for AI-assisted shopping, the highest of any category.

The money is real too. Adobe forecasts $26.1 billion in online grocery sales this holiday season, up 10.3%, and AI-referred traffic to U.S. retail sites up 130%, with the biggest jump, 159%, on Thanksgiving Day itself.

Why won’t this show up in your analytics?#

Because most of it happens inside the retailer. Sparky, Kroger’s assistant and Instacart’s Cart Assistant, already live at Food Bazaar, Heritage Grocers Group and Woodman’s with ALDI U.S. among those to follow, never send a click to your site. The sale lands in the retailer’s data as an ordinary order.

Off-retailer AI is murky as well. CivicScience found 61% of AI shoppers research on one platform and buy somewhere else. In his October 27 roundup, Scot Wingo said his team saw missing tracking parameters on some ChatGPT desktop links and fewer product cards in some answers, observations rather than a study. If your plan is to watch ChatGPT referrals in GA4 through November, you’ll miss most of the story.

What should a CPG brand do in the next four weeks?#

Thanksgiving is November 26. Most of this can still get done.

• Run the Grocery Dive prompt yourself. Use the Kroger, Safeway, Walmart and Instacart assistants, plus your own category’s version (“stocking stuffers for a 10-year-old”, “Friendsgiving snacks for 12”). Note which brand fills your ingredient slot, the pack size and the price. Run it again next week, because answers move.
• Treat retailer bundles and recipe hubs as AI shelf space. Walmart built recipes around its basket, and Sparky adds the basket. Getting into those bundles is a category-management conversation with the buyer, so start it now for Christmas and next year.
• Write your titles in recipe language. Our view: an assistant matching “french fried onions for green bean casserole” to a SKU does better when the title says exactly that, with the size. Check the first lines of your retailer descriptions for the words a recipe would use.
• State servings and pack size plainly. “Dinner for 10” is a quantity problem. Make it easy to work out how many cans or boxes that takes.
• Price for the comparison. In the open AI carts, national brands showed up next to cheaper store brands. A rollback or promo in the week before Thanksgiving makes that pick easier to keep.
• Measure with retailer data. Retail media reports and sales by item will tell you more than referral traffic this season.

We wrote about the other half of this, outside agents shopping Walmart and Amazon’s choice to block them, in our post on Walmart’s agent rules, and about why known brands start ahead in ChatGPT’s brand shortlist. For quick holiday charts on ecommerce and CPG, see Xenalytics.

If you want to know which of your SKUs ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity name for holiday prompts today, run a free SKU audit or book a demo. More on how we score products is on the Searchpanel homepage.