Anastasia Trofimova spent years in the rooms where grocery empires make their decisions. As a consultant at Boston Consulting Group, she sat across from the CEOs of some of the world’s largest retailers, billion-dollar operations, household names, and helped them map the future.

She understood their supply chains, their margins, their consumer strategies. She knew the industry’s architecture better than almost anyone.

And that’s exactly how she knew it was broken.

“I was helping these companies optimize what already existed,” Trofimova recalls. “But nobody was asking the harder question: why does grocery shopping still feel like a chore from 1987?”

It’s a question that sounds almost funny, until you understand how far behind grocery retail has fallen relative to modern consumer needs and technological possibility. Grocery retail is a $10 trillion global industry. It touches every human being on the planet, multiple times a week, for their entire lives.

And yet, for the average American family, it still means forgotten ingredients, duplicated pantry items, handwritten shopping lists on scraps of paper (in 2026, somehow), the after-work “what’s for dinner?” panic more nights than anyone likes to admit, and the mental gymnastics of juggling budgets, allergens, and each family member’s dietary preferences. It’s a form of invisible, relentless cognitive labor, and in 80% of U.S. households, it falls predominantly on women! The cost of getting it wrong? Hundreds of dollars quietly wasted every month on food that never gets eaten. The technology revolution that reshaped music, travel, finance, and entertainment has barely grazed the grocery cart.

Trofimova saw this gap not as a complaint, but as the opportunity of a generation.

So she left.

Walking away from a high-six-figure BCG salary isn’t a decision most people make lightly, or honestly, at all. But Anastasia had spent enough time advising industry leaders to recognize the pattern: the next billion-dollar company in any sector is always the one that stops incrementally improving the old system and builds a completely new one instead.

“Grocery is one of the largest industries in the world, and one of the least transformed by technology,” she says. “Consumers in 2026 deserve a grocery experience that is actually built around their lives, and AI finally makes that possible.”

That’s exactly what she set out to build. Sundae is an AI-powered meal planning and grocery shopping platform that does what no retail app has managed to pull off: translating inspiring creator recipes directly into pre-filled grocery carts, delivering genuine personalization, and seamlessly connecting what a household wants to eat with what they actually need to buy. Using AI, Sundae app learns a user’s tastes, dietary needs, budget, and schedule, then generates intelligent meal plans and optimized grocery lists that eliminate the chaos, the waste, and the friction that define the weekly shop for most families.

It sounds simple. That’s precisely the point.

The best solutions to deeply entrenched problems often do. But building it required exactly the kind of insider knowledge Trofimova spent years accumulating: understanding not just the consumer pain points, but why retailers themselves had never solved them, what structural and commercial incentives kept innovation at arm’s length, and where AI could move into the space that billion-dollar incumbents were too slow, too cautious, or too comfortable to fill.

Trofimova isn’t positioning Sundae as yet another recipe app. She’s positioning it as a category-defining platform, the AI layer the grocery industry never built for itself, delivered directly to modern families.

In a space this large, this universal, and this underserved, that framing isn’t hubris. It’s a solution already working for more than 40,000 households.

Built by someone who used to design strategy for the industry giants themselves, it might just be the most credible bet in the room.