700 Stores, 10 Million Shoppers, $3M Raised: Cooklist CEO & Co-Founder Daniel Vitiello
This one is a build deep dive. Daniel has spent eight years on the same problem, and the answer has changed shape three times along the way: a consumer app in 2018, a shoppable recipe platform in 2023, and now a conversational shopping assistant running inside grocersโ own sites.
We go deep on the plumbing here: product catalogs, ontologies, eval systems, model selection, retail media, and what an agent does when a shopper types โtaco night.โ If you like knowing how these things actually work under the hood, this is your episode.
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Highlights:
- ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ป๐๐บ๐ฏ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐: Live in over 700 stores, reaching over 10 million shoppers, with the number of locations set to double before the end of the year. The consumer app has over a million users.
- ๐ฐ๐ญ ๐ฑ๐ฎ๐๐ ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ ๐๐ผ ๐น๐ถ๐๐ฒ: A one-line JavaScript install that reuses the retailerโs existing catalog, add-to-cart, analytics, and retail media. National scale in six weeks.
- ๐ฆ๐ฒ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ฐ๐ต ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐๐ฒ๐น๐ฒ๐ฐ๐ โ ๐ฟ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ฒ๐ ๐ฎ๐ป๐ฑ ๐ฎ๐ฐ๐ฐ๐ฒ๐ฝ๐: Danielโs framing for the whole shift. The old era: you search one thing, you select it. The new one: the agent assembles a solution and you approve it.
- ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ฒ๐๐ฎ๐น ๐๐๐๐๐ฒ๐บ: Thousands of test scenarios with grading criteria aligned to each retailerโs merchandising principles, run tens or hundreds of times to get a distribution of responses.
- ๐ง๐ต๐ฒ ๐ณ๐ถ๐๐ต ๐ฟ๐๐น๐ฒ: Retailers write procedures the agent pulls when a scenario matches. One of Danielโs favorites: if youโre cooking fish today or tomorrow, it recommends fresh. If itโs later in the week, frozen.
- ๐ง๐ฟ๐ฎ๐ถ๐ป๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฎ ๐ป๐ฒ๐ ๐ฑ๐ถ๐ด๐ถ๐๐ฎ๐น ๐ฒ๐บ๐ฝ๐น๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฒ: Onboarding is essentially an interview with the business. What are your values? How do you respond? What are your merchandising principles? That becomes the agentโs identity and personality.
- ๐ญ,๐ฌ๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐๐ผ๐๐ฟ๐๐ต ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐๐น๐ ๐ฏ๐๐ป๐ฑ๐น๐ฒ๐: Instead of one holiday carousel every shopper sees, merchant teams define ~20 axes โ price, dietary needs, brand preference โ and an agentic process generates permutations personalized against transaction history.
- ๐๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ๐ณ๐ ๐ผ๐ป ๐ง๐ถ๐ธ๐ง๐ผ๐ธ: Long before ChatGPT, Cooklist ran a TikTok series generating recipes with GPT-2 and early GPT-3. The models got good at basic recipes so fast that the fun moved to challenging them to be creative.
Daniel is one of those founders who has clearly built the thing himself, and it shows in the answers. We learned about a thousand things from this one. Enjoy the conversation.
Timestamps:
02:57 Welcome Daniel Vitiello, CEO & co-founder of Cooklist
03:10 Grocery, CPG, and retailer-hosted agents: the pod's favorite topics
04:46 The $1 check and the handwritten letter for loyalty data
05:46 Why 2017 was the moment
06:12 Inside the Cooklist app: home inventory and the AI chef
07:35 AI as the thread: Kurzweil, GPT-2, and the AI Chefs TikTok series
09:37 B2C to B2B, and the synergies of running both
12:05 The cat food problem
13:34 The core identity system: hummus, three ways
15:58 Search and select vs. review and accept
16:23 The spark for B2B: Target, Techstars, and saying no
18:45 Recipe commerce and meal-pairing merchandising
20:19 Funding: RevTech, Mercury Fund, and profitability
21:56 Freemium, pro, and advertising in the app
22:48 700 stores, 10 million shoppers
24:28 The flagship deployment: live in 41 days
25:56 Ontology, context engineering, and interviewing the retailer
27:03 Non-determinism and the eval system
29:06 Entry points: sparkles, suggested prompts, and PDP workflows
31:01 How the catalog and inventory get in
33:41 Procedures: the weekly flyer and the fish rule
35:55 Cost, speed, and the token-efficient stream
37:38 Model agnostic: scoring Opus against Sonnet
38:15 Instacart, Storefront Pro, and winning head-to-head
39:47 Retail media and Criteo
40:22 Agentic search and the "taco night" problem
42:02 Agentic merchandising: 1,000 Fourth of July bundles
42:55 Proactive carts, and the 50% who finish in the store
43:43 Smart fridges and forecasting demand
44:44 Where to find Daniel
Timestamps:
02:57 Welcome Daniel Vitiello, CEO & co-founder of Cooklist
03:10 Grocery, CPG, and retailer-hosted agents: the pod's favorite topics
04:46 The $1 check and the handwritten letter for loyalty data
05:46 Why 2017 was the moment
06:12 Inside the Cooklist app: home inventory and the AI chef
07:35 AI as the thread: Kurzweil, GPT-2, and the AI Chefs TikTok series
09:37 B2C to B2B, and the synergies of running both
12:05 The cat food problem
13:34 The core identity system: hummus, three ways
15:58 Search and select vs. review and accept
16:23 The spark for B2B: Target, Techstars, and saying no
18:45 Recipe commerce and meal-pairing merchandising
20:19 Funding: RevTech, Mercury Fund, and profitability
21:56 Freemium, pro, and advertising in the app
22:48 700 stores, 10 million shoppers
24:28 The flagship deployment: live in 41 days
25:56 Ontology, context engineering, and interviewing the retailer
27:03 Non-determinism and the eval system
29:06 Entry points: sparkles, suggested prompts, and PDP workflows
31:01 How the catalog and inventory get in
33:41 Procedures: the weekly flyer and the fish rule
35:55 Cost, speed, and the token-efficient stream
37:38 Model agnostic: scoring Opus against Sonnet
38:15 Instacart, Storefront Pro, and winning head-to-head
39:47 Retail media and Criteo
40:22 Agentic search and the "taco night" problem
42:02 Agentic merchandising: 1,000 Fourth of July bundles
42:55 Proactive carts, and the 50% who finish in the store
43:43 Smart fridges and forecasting demand
44:44 Where to find Daniel
๐ Connect with Daniel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dkvitiello/
๐ Learn more about Cooklist: https://cooklist.com/
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