OpenCommerce and why we built MealMe Connect
A fundamental blocker to AI truly participating in shopping is the lack of access to real-time inventory and the ability to place orders. Retailers, restaurants, and marketplaces often actively block AI agents and rarely offer open APIs for these functions.
This creates a bottleneck: AI can generate interest and intent, but it can’t complete the transaction. It reminds us of the early days of fintech—before OpenBanking and Plaid gave developers standardized access to bank data and transactions, financial apps were mostly read-only.
We built MealMe Connect to solve this problem for commerce.
MealMe Connect acts as a universal layer between apps and the fragmented retail ecosystem. It enables real-time product availability and direct order injection—even for platforms that don’t expose APIs. Our goal is to unlock what we call OpenCommerce: standardized access to commerce infrastructure for developers and AI systems alike.
Without a layer like this, AI remains read-only in the commerce stack. We think it’s time to change that.