In the bustling world of on-demand grocery delivery, speed has long been the undisputed king. Sixty60, the Shoprite Group’s flagship rapid-delivery app, built an empire on the promise of getting groceries to your door in under 60 minutes. But speed, according to the retail giant, is no longer enough. The new battlefield is anticipation—knowing what you want before you even know it yourself.
Enter Pixie.
Shoprite Group has officially launched Pixie, a new artificial intelligence-powered shopping assistant embedded directly into the Sixty60 platform. Developed entirely in-house by the group’s digital innovation hub, ShopriteX, Pixie represents a fundamental shift from reactive scrolling to proactive suggestion. The tool does not simply wait for a user to type a search. Instead, it learns, predicts, and curates—using the one resource that has become more valuable than gold in the digital age: customer data.
“Pixie is not just another chatbot,” said Neil Schreuder, Chief Strategy and Innovation Officer at the Shoprite Group, in a virtual briefing from the company’s Brackenfell headquarters. “Chatbots answer questions. Pixie answers needs you haven’t even expressed yet. It is the difference between a shopping list and a shopping intuition.”
How Pixie Works
Behind Pixie’s clean, minimalist interface lies a complex machine learning engine that ingests and analyzes multiple layers of customer behavior. The AI draws from:
- Purchase history: Every item a customer has bought through Sixty60 over the lifetime of their account.
- Recency and frequency: What you buy every week (milk, bread, eggs) versus what you buy once a month (cleaning supplies, pet food) versus what you buy seasonally (braai essentials in summer, soup mixes in winter).
- Time and location patterns: The app learns that you order nappies every Tuesday evening from your office, or that you always add a chocolate bar to your Friday night order.
- Promotion responsiveness: Which deals you ignore and which you cannot resist, allowing Pixie to tailor offers to your actual price sensitivity.
- Real-time inventory: Unlike static shopping lists, Pixie knows what is in stock at the specific Sixty60 dark store serving your address at that exact moment.
Armed with this data, Pixie does not present users with a blank search bar and an endless category menu. Instead, upon opening the app, a returning customer is greeted with a personalized “Your Quick List”—a rotating selection of 10 to 15 items that the AI predicts they are likely to need within the next 48 hours.
For example, a customer who buys two liters of milk every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday will see milk automatically suggested on Sunday evening. A parent whose baby formula purchase pattern shows a 14-day cycle will receive a discreet nudge on day 13. A customer who recently bought cleaning vinegar and baking soda might be offered a discounted pack of microfiber cloths.
“We are not trying to be creepy,” Schreuder emphasized, anticipating the inevitable privacy concerns. “We are trying to be useful. The goal is to reduce cognitive load. How many times have you stood in a supermarket aisle, staring at shelves, trying to remember if you have tomato paste at home? Pixie eliminates that friction. It says: ‘Based on your history, you usually buy tomato paste when you buy mince. You just added mince. Would you like tomato paste?'”
The Data Privacy Question
The phrase “customer data powers AI” inevitably raises red flags in an era of high-profile data breaches, algorithmic bias, and growing skepticism about how corporations handle personal information. Shoprite Group has moved aggressively to address these concerns before they take root.
In conjunction with Pixie’s launch, the company updated its privacy policy and introduced a new, granular consent dashboard within the Sixty60 app. Users can now choose exactly what data Pixie may access:
- Tier 1 (Essential): Current session activity and checkout data. Required for the app to function.
- Tier 2 (Personalization): Purchase history, saved addresses, and favorite products. Pixie’s core predictions require this tier.
- Tier 3 (Advanced Insights): Location history, browsing behavior within the app (how long you linger on product pages), and promotion click-through rates. This tier enables the most sophisticated suggestions but is entirely optional.
Critically, ShopriteX has confirmed that no customer data is sold to third parties for advertising or marketing purposes. Pixie’s learning models are trained on aggregated, anonymized data, and individual user profiles are encrypted and stored locally on the user’s device as much as possible.
“We see data as a responsibility, not a commodity,” said Christiaan van den Berg, Head of Data Science at ShopriteX. “We are not building Pixie to sell your shopping habits to cereal brands. We are building Pixie to save you time. Every line of code, every algorithm, every model is optimized for that single metric: minutes saved per order.”
A Simplified Interface for a New Era
Beyond the AI predictions, Pixie introduces a dramatically simplified user interface. The traditional grocery app layout—a search bar atop a sprawling grid of categories like “Fresh Produce,” “Dairy,” “Bakery,” “Household”—has been collapsed. In its place, Pixie offers three primary views:
- Your Quick List: The AI-generated prediction list, updated in real time.
- Smart Repeats: A dedicated section showing products you buy on a regular schedule, with one-tap reordering for the same quantity and delivery window.
- Discovery Mode: An opt-in feature where Pixie suggests one new product per week based on your taste profile—”You liked biltong, try this droëwors”—essentially a highly personalized, low-pressure recommendation engine.
The traditional search bar remains available for users who know exactly what they want, but ShopriteX’s internal testing found that after two weeks of using Pixie, 67% of users stopped using search entirely, relying instead on the AI’s predictions.
“The search bar is a confession of uncertainty,” van den Berg said, half-joking. “You search because you don’t know what you need, or you can’t find it. Pixie removes that uncertainty. It doesn’t ask what you want. It shows you what you need.”
The Competitive Landscape
Shoprite’s move comes as rival retailers scramble to integrate AI into their digital offerings. Checkers, via its Sixty60 competitor Checkers Sixty60 (a separate entity despite the similar name, a point of ongoing legal tension), has experimented with basic personalized recommendations but has not yet launched a dedicated AI assistant. Woolworths’ Dash delivery app offers a “Favourites” feature but lacks predictive capabilities. International giants like Amazon Fresh have deployed AI shopping assistants in the US and UK, but their South African presence remains limited.
ShopriteX’s decision to develop Pixie entirely in-house—rather than licensing a third-party AI platform—gives the group a significant advantage in customization and speed of iteration. The team behind Pixie includes data scientists, software engineers, and even behavioral psychologists who studied how users interact with grocery apps under time pressure.
“We could have bought an off-the-shelf solution in six weeks,” Schreuder admitted. “Instead, we built our own in eighteen months. Why? Because off-the-shelf AI does not understand that a South African customer’s shopping basket in Khayelitsha looks nothing like a basket in Sandton. It does not understand load-shedding schedules affecting frozen food purchases. It does not understand that ‘pap’ means different things in different provinces. Our AI had to be African. It had to be local. And that takes time.”
Early User Feedback and Rollout
Pixie launched initially to a closed beta group of 5,000 active Sixty60 users across Cape Town, Johannesburg, and Durban. The feedback, according to Shoprite, has been overwhelmingly positive.
Nomfundo Nkosi, a 34-year-old accountant from Soweto and beta tester, told the company in a video testimonial: “I used to spend twenty minutes every Tuesday night building my cart. Now I open Pixie, it already has milk, bread, maize meal, and chicken—the things I buy every week. I just click confirm. It feels like the app knows my kitchen better than I do.”
Another tester, retiree Johan van der Merwe from Pretoria, was more skeptical initially but converted after a practical demonstration. “I thought it was Big Brother watching my groceries. Then last week I was sick with flu, opened the app just to get tissues and soup, and Pixie had already put them in my cart—plus throat lozenges, which I forgot, and a two-liter Coke, which I didn’t know I wanted until I saw it. I’m a believer now.”
The full public rollout began yesterday, with Pixie appearing automatically for all Sixty60 users who have opted into personalized recommendations. Users who prefer the classic interface can toggle “Classic Mode” in settings, disabling Pixie’s predictions and returning to the traditional search-and-category layout.
What Comes Next
ShopriteX is already planning the next iteration of Pixie, tentatively called “Pixie Household.” The upgrade would allow multiple users within a single household (family members, roommates) to link their profiles while maintaining individual preferences, with the AI learning to distinguish between, for example, a parent’s weekly shop and a teenager’s late-night snack runs.
Longer term, the company is exploring voice integration, allowing users to say “Pixie, I’m making spaghetti bolognese” and having the AI assemble a complete ingredient list based on past purchases and standard recipes.
“We are at the very beginning of what AI can do for everyday life,” Schreuder said. “Right now, Pixie saves you five minutes on a grocery order. Next year, maybe it saves you ten. The year after, maybe it saves you from ever running out of toilet paper at 10 PM again. That is not a technological breakthrough. That is peace of mind. And you cannot put a price on that.”
For now, as Sixty60’s signature green delivery bikes zip through South African suburbs carrying milk, bread, and an increasing number of AI-predicted items, one thing is clear: the grocery store of the future is no longer a place you visit. It is an algorithm that visits you—quietly, helpfully, and always before you run out of coffee.
Pixie is available now on the Sixty60 app for iOS and Android. No additional subscription fee is required. Your data, as they say, has already done the work.
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