Meijer is a large supercenter chain located in the Midwest. With 237 supercenters in six states, Meijer is one of the largest retailers and private companies in the nation.

From shopping carts to self-checkouts, Meijer always leads on the frontline of innovation to ensure Meijer guest satisfaction.

Our Personal Shopping Assistant app (Thrifty) continues that tradition by enabling a guest to ask Thrifty anything they would ask an in-store Meijer team member. In addition, a guest can navigate through coupons and check competitor pricing.

Meijer guests interact with Thrifty using either text or voice. If Thrifty isn’t sure what they mean, it responds with a list of possibilities from which a guest can select.

After an item is selected, Thrifty tells a guest where it’s located in the store, how much it costs, and if there are any coupons available from Meijer’s rewards program, mPerks. Guests can clip all coupons to their mPerks account and display a single barcode at checkout to apply all of their savings.

Thrifty also informs guests of item prices at competitors like Target or Walmart.

If an item is missing from the shelf, Thrifty notifies a Meijer team member to check for more.

Thrifty is built using the Microsoft Bot Framework and is hosted on Microsoft Azure cloud services. It uses Microsoft LUIS for natural language processing and supports both Apple iOS and Google Android devices.