WhatsApp-ing a pizza? Châtaigne bets on conversational commerce to disrupt meal delivery
A Swiss startup is challenging conventional meal delivery platforms with an AI-powered solution that operates entirely through WhatsApp. Châtaigne removes the friction of app downloads and account creation for consumers, leveraging a platform that billions already use daily.
The system works intuitively: customers simply text their order to a restaurant's dedicated WhatsApp number. Châtaigne's AI then processes these natural language requests, compiles preferences, generates an order summary and facilitates payment within the same conversation thread. The completed order flows directly into the restaurant's existing systems, bypassing the costly intermediaries currently dominating the market. On the consumer's end, Châtaigne's focus on WhatsApp sidesteps app fatigue and taps into existing behavior.
Born from a San Francisco hackathon, Châtaigne represents a deliberate shift toward conversational commerce. "Apps and websites are the past — conversation is the future," explains the founding team, who chose the challenging food delivery sector specifically for its high volume and tight deadlines. Recently awarded a CHF 20,000 FIT Digital Grant, the startup is expanding its functionality and preparing for rollout. Their vision extends beyond restaurants, positioning conversational AI as the natural evolution of commerce.
It's a back-to-the-future kind of move — taking digital purchasing away from constrictive user interfaces and back towards natural human interaction patterns. The conversational approach aligns with how commerce functioned for thousands of years in physical marketplaces: through dialogue, negotiation and personal connection. Châtaigne and others (like Amazon's Alexa +) are leveraging advanced AI to recreate something fundamentally ancient, with one major difference. This time around, the interactions are human-to-bot, not human-to-human.
The conversational model opens up possibilities for more nuanced transactions, too. Instead of filtering through predetermined options, customers can express preferences in natural language: "something spicy but not too hot" or "similar to what I ordered last time but vegetarian." We're likely to see commerce-as-conversation expand beyond food delivery into other high-frequency categories. The real competitive advantage will come from how well these systems understand context, remember preferences and handle complex requests — areas where sophisticated language models provide a clear advantage over existing systems.
