I got tired of watching good brands overpay for bad media.
Grocer Folk is a small, AI-native retail-media agency I started for the founders I kept meeting: real brands on grocery shelves, spending on Instacart and Meta and Google, with no clear read on what was actually working. I build the operating layer that fixes that.
The background
I spent years running paid acquisition and growth for consumer brands before retail media was a category anyone had a budget line for. The pattern was always the same. A founder builds something people actually want, lands distribution, and then hits a wall: the ad platforms are dense, the reporting lies by omission, and there is no one on the team whose full-time job is to connect spend to sales.
Most agencies are built to manage a long roster and bill on a percentage of ad spend, which quietly rewards them for spending more of your money. I wanted the opposite. A short client list, a flat retainer, and advice that is never distorted by what is most profitable for the agency. That only works if the operation runs lean, so I built Grocer Folk on AI agents for research, reporting, ICP analysis, and campaign monitoring, with a senior operator on every account.
The result is a team that runs smaller and goes deeper. We learn how each brand's business actually works, then use ads as the instrument to move the number that matters: store-level and blended return, not a single channel's vanity ROAS.
What that looks like in practice.
Crafty Ramen, a Canadian frozen-ramen brand, was spending across retail media with no unified view of performance. We rebuilt their Instacart campaign structure, fixed budget allocation, and put every channel into one report. Blended ROAS moved from under 2x to 4x+, and the improved unit economics helped fund their US launch. Read the full case study →
Why Grocer Folk works the way it does
Selective by design
A handful of clients at a time. Depth beats roster size when the job is connecting ad spend to real business outcomes.
Retainer, not a cut of spend
A flat monthly fee, so the incentive is your results, never inflating your media budget to grow our invoice.
AI-native operation
Research, reporting, and monitoring run on AI agents. That is how a lean team delivers senior-level execution across five channels.
Where I work
The platforms we run are chosen because they let us tie ad spend directly to offline and store sales:
Want a straight read on your setup?
Tell me where you are stuck. If there is a fit, you get an operator-level review of your channels, your reporting, and the highest-probability fixes before we ever talk scope or pricing.