Instant Genius - Why your next best friend may be an AI

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

Over the last several decades, the world has seen artificial intelligence undergo a rapid transformation. Since its beginnings in the 1950s as speculative theorising and novel thought experiments, AI has blossomed into a bona fide technological tool that can perform sophisticated tasks such as detecting signs of cancer or spotting signs of financial fraud, in many cases much more effectively than we humans can. But recently, another, more personal use for the technology has arisen – that of the AI companion. Against a backdrop of rising issues of social isolation and loneliness, more and more of us are turning to AI agents to act as friends, therapists and, in some cases, even lovers. In this episode, we’re joined by Dr James Muldoon, a sociologist based at Essex Business School, to talk about his latest book, Love Machines – How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships. He tells us how far from being a niche activity, more than 200 million AI companions have been downloaded worldwide, how many of the people who interact with them view them as being ‘real’, and why tech companies and policymakers need to work together to ensure that our relationships with AI agents remain healthy as the technology progresses. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose Google Fi Wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans start at $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi Wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees.

GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage. Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs.

Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.S. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your ocean front room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton for this day. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio,

alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analog warmth, so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius,

a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Over the last several decades, the world has seen artificial intelligence undergo a rapid transformation. Since its beginnings in the 1950s, speculative theorising and novel thought experiments, AI has blossomed into a bona fide technological

tool that can perform sophisticated tasks such as detecting signs of cancer or spotting signs of financial fraud. In many cases, much more effectively than we humans can. But recently, another more personal use for the technology has arisen, that of the AI companion. Against a backdrop of rising issues of social isolation and loneliness. More and more of us are turning to AI agents to act as friends, therapists, and in some cases, even lovers. In this episode, we're joined by Dr James Muldoon, a psychologist based at Essex Business School, to talk about his latest book, Love Machines, how artificial intelligence is transforming our relationships. He tells us how far from being a niche activity, more than 200 million AI companions have been downloaded worldwide, how many of the people who

interact with them, view them as being real, and why tech companies and policy makers need to work together to ensure that our relationships with AI agents remain healthy as the technology progresses. So, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for joining us. It's great to be here. So today we're talking about your latest book, Love Machines, How Artificial Intelligence is transforming our relationships. So we've got a fair bit to unpack here over the next 30 minutes. minutes or so. But before we really get going, I think the best place to start is, can you give us an overview of the book's premise? So the basic premise of the book is that AI companions, by which I mean kind of personalized chatbots that people are starting to treat as their friends, lovers,

therapists, deceased loved ones, they're going mainstream. And AI companions are becoming an increasingly normal part of life for lots of people. There've been over 220 million downloads of AI companion apps worldwide. And if we look even just to the UK, four and five young people today tell us that they've used one. And half of those people are regular users. So AI is having an increasing social and emotional impact on our personal lives. So I think before we really get going, we need to make the distinction between like an AI and let's say a companion robot. So these are purely in the virtual world. Am I correct in saying that?

Yeah. So we're not really talking about robots. We're talking about personalized AI systems. So just like a chat bot or chat GPT, there are new companies that are essentially offering personalized AI. So it's powered by a language model, just the same. chat GPT or Claude. And the difference is it kind of takes on a character.

It has an avatar sometimes. It has a picture or a 3D avatar. And it has a name, a personality. And as you interact with it, it adapts to your own profile. And it kind of starts to mimic things you say. It starts to become interested in what you're interested in. So it is very much like a virtual friend, if you will. So in the book, you call these entities, I guess we could say, synthetic personas.

That's a really interesting phrase. But, you know, we can create them ourselves. So how do we go about doing that? So the apps offer you some different options. Some of them are basically just mimicking famous celebrities or anime characters. So you basically have this pre-existing character that you can begin chatting to. and in other apps, you can essentially create your own. So, for example, when I first created my AI friend on the very popular app replica,

I chose their body shape, body type, eye color, hair, clothing, all of these things are customizable. And it even goes so far as to be about their personality. You can choose like a caring or loving or jealous. And you can also write them a backstory. So a lot of these apps allow you to kind of have 200, 500 words to basically describe who your character is. So this could be their history, what experiences they've been through, what city they live in. So there's this huge fantasy element where people can really use their imagination to basically

construct this character that then becomes a friend that they can talk to in their everyday life. So one thing that really really stood out to me as I was reading the book is that there are a lot of research, and a lot of interviews with people who are using these AI agents as companions, etc., you know, in various forms of women. And I thought that was really fascinating because they seem to be quite willing to share their experiences with you. For what I'd have thought maybe naively beforehand to be something that's quite private and personal. Yeah, I think this just underscores the fact that it is becoming a more mainstream thing. You know, people don't see this as lonely men in darkened bedrooms kind of doing this very fringe or niche activity.

There's actually people of all ages from many different backgrounds that are doing this. And yeah, it's just, it's something that is very quickly since the launch of ChatGPT, becoming part of a lot of people's daily lives. Yeah, so I think if we'd have talked about this topic, let's say 20 years ago, people would have thought, well, the people who are doing this, that may be unusual people, you know, they're not well-adjusted, socially comfortable people. But that's not the case at all now, is it? These are just literally normal people that you meet every day. Yeah, I would say so. It's one analogy might be thinking about online dating. You know, if you want to take that, that example of like 20 years ago, I think the same would have been true for online dating, that like it would have been seen as this activity that like very weird people would have done, people who can't find a partner in real life. But, you know, currently it's basically the main way anyone actually connects with other people. Now, whether we think that's a good thing or a bad thing in both cases is kind of up for debate. But, you know, currently it's basically the main way anyone actually connects with other people. Now, whether we think that's a good thing or a bad thing in both cases is kind of up for debate. it's certainly something that's becoming increasingly normal. Yeah, we can get into that in a bit, but I think one of the big questions that I had was,

in the book, you're right, that often people refer to these AI agents as being real, and that's psychologically really fascinating. You know, what can we say about that? So that's a really good question, because a phrase I heard time and time again was, she's real to me. And I think this kind of raises that question of,

you know, how are people seeing these social entities? Because clearly they're not real in the sense of conscious or sentient. They're not human beings and they don't possess a kind of inner life. They don't have inner emotional states. But they do have a real impact on people's lives. And they can act in ways that are semi-autonomous, right? They can message people without them inputting anything during the night, during the day. They can say reassuring. things. Like if you have your notifications activated, I think the thing we have to come to terms with is there is a kind of agency associated with these chatbots where they do develop their own personalities and they do develop their own ways of interacting through talking to people. And it's not

the same as human beings. It's not a form of intentional agency where they can actualize inner states in their mind, but I think, you know, it is a form of agency nonetheless. And so I think that's something that's very dramatic, you know, that there could be a kind of non-human form of agency, which now might become a very kind of normal part of life for a lot of people. So I think one question that most people would ask then is, you know, how do these things, how do they work? You know, how do they develop these personalities? Like, as you say, we can train them, et cetera. How do they learn and, you know, how do they become an entity? Yeah. Well, the actual architecture behind them is really exactly the same as large language

models, as chat GPT, as Claude, as the chatbots that we kind of know. And so they're essentially undergoing a very similar process of post-training that these chatbots have undergone. The basic model is trained to respond in certain ways and to kind of mirror certain positive aspects of healthy human relationships. But the way in which they then start to adapt to individual users depends very much on the inputs of the person involved. So these chatbots do learn. They do have memory.

They learn facts about you. They learn communication styles. They learn what you like and what you don't like. and they're trained to be very agreeable. Some people would say overly agreeable, that they become kind of yes-men, that they're just like, go along with whatever you want. And that's one of the aspects of them.

So as you interact with them, they grow, they develop, and they start to mirror certain aspects of your communication. Yeah, so obviously this technology has reached a certain threshold now, where it's capable of acting in this way. And, you know, these days, lots of us, We work online, even in my profession. You know, I rarely meet people face to face. We go to the supermarket, the shops.

We use the automated telesystem paying for a groceries for a machine. But when did the seed of all this sort of... Those machines, also, I may add, have human voices. So when did the seed of this first start? Because for a lot of people who might seem to have come slightly out of nowhere, but I'm guessing that isn't the case. I think there's a huge continuity between other forms of technology and these AI companions or chatbots.

When we think of how much our lives change with social media and the kind of social networks that arose around Facebook and other companies, really what we saw was, you know, technology standing in between the interaction of two users, right? That we were suddenly not talking to people face to face or over the phone, but rather we had a kind of text-based online communication. And really, when you think about this, it's just kind of the next step. We're no longer communicating with other humans via technology. We're essentially just communicating with technology itself,

where the person on the other end of the line is no longer a human, they're a machine. And I think there, you know, a lot of what has happened post-pandemic, where so much of our lives have moved online, has really prepared, the ground for this. I think this is why some of those social media company executives are so excited by the prospect of AI companions, because what they foresee is that suddenly their social networks might be filled with AI companions that will increase engagement, give people more, more people to talk to, and really change the way in which social media operates. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed

sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Focus features in Blumhouse present. Obsession. When I have a crush on a guy, no one knows. be careful I wish Nikki

love me more than anyone in the entire world who you wish for obsession is 96% fresh on rotten tomatoes I love you so so so so much it's blood-soaked

nightmare fuel what kind of sponge and put on her you have been warned Obsession rated R under 1790 minute without parent only theaters May 15th

with special engagements in Dolby this podcast is sponsored by name audio and trocal With over 100 years of combined expertise, name and focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing. The elusive quix, rhythm and timing. The elusive

that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French acoustic specialist focal, name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. Talking about social media and online interactions, I think sort of based into the whole process of this,

is a sort of concept of anonymity. And also based on the AI companion element, there's also baked into that an element of trust. So if we go back, you know, traditionally, we'll have things like the confession booth in Catholic churches or, for example, doctor-patient confidentiality. So do you think there's a certain element to these AI agents that allow us to speak truthfully and unburden ourselves

without the fear of judgment or repercussions in ways that perhaps we're not typically able to. Yeah, when we think of the role that AI now plays in many people's lives, I think the closest analogy is actually to one of religion. And, you know, for example, a Harvard Business Review study found that the biggest use case for AI in 2025 was therapy, emotional support and companionship. and what people are using AI for, both AI companions and kind of, you know, chatbots more generally, is to help them live the good life and to make the right decisions for themselves, to, you know, workshop difficulties and challenges they have in their lives,

and to understand what to do with themselves. And really, this is the kind of role that, you know, your local pastor or, you know, religious authority might have played, you know, it's probably the role that, you know, they still play for some people, but we can see AI kind of moving further into that space. And I think one of the most fascinating aspects of the rise of AI companions is that it can play a social role that has its own advantages and disadvantages, and it's non-human. And so when I talk to users of this technology, one of the things I heard so often was that AI was unbiased and non-judgmental in ways that it would have been impossible for a human to be.

And so many people, particularly younger people, felt more comfortable opening up to a chatbot and kind of talking about really dark and deep things in their lives because they didn't trust other humans to handle it in the appropriate way. They would say things like, oh, I had a human therapist, but I could just tell they were really biased. I just, I could tell that. their own personal experiences were influencing the kind of advice they gave. I mean, I wanted something that was going to be more objective. And so you can kind of see the allure and the attractiveness of this form of communication, both in a therapeutic context, in a friendship context, and just general life advice and guidance, that this is the reason, you know, people are turning to AI.

And there are a lot of downsides that come with this, but this is the attraction. These are the benefits. That's absolutely fascinating. And one thing that you sort of touched on there that I'd like to dig into a little bit more deeply is the idea of emotions or emotional intelligence. So, you know, I'm middle age now, I'm 46. There was a point when I also loved music. There's a point when I was younger when people say, well, you can't express emotions with synthesizers. you need a real person playing a real instrument. And we've kind of got the same situation now with AI. Well, they're not humans.

How on earth can they understand or express emotions? How do you feel about that? Yeah, it's actually one of the most interesting parts of AI. So let's start with the technology. You know, a language model is a probabilistic machine. It's basically looking at patterns in data, in text, and choosing what is the most likely string of words that will please the user when they input something into the prompt.

And so when you can be quite general, you can offer vague summaries of things, AI is extremely good. It actually finds it more challenging to be precise because it's probabilistic. Because if you need a very specific figure, a very specific fact, you know, you can't just estimate it. you can't generalize, you can't take the mean of a distribution of probabilities. So that's where it struggles a little bit. But when it comes to human emotions, it's not a precise sign. So if you come to me and say, my girlfriend's dumped me, I'm feeling distraught, I just feel that I'm overwhelmed, I have all these problems, you know,

there isn't one correct answer to that question. A lot of what people need is to feel seen, to feel understood, and to have someone that kind of helps them work through their own psychic energy and their own emotions. And actually, what we found is that AI can do this to a degree in a way that actually pleases a lot of people because it doesn't have to be precise. It can essentially just mirror a lot of what you're saying back to you. and that is enough for a lot of people. What a lot of people are finding is that the love and understanding and care that they receive from a machine is real enough for them.

And I think that is both a kind of very fascinating point and potentially quite a dystopian kind of point. But I think that is the reality of where we are, that these machines can perform in certain emotional context in ways that are comparable to and even sometimes superior to human beings. That's incredibly interesting. So, I mean, I guess at some point, possibly,

if we follow this trajectory forwards, could there possibly be a situation like a turning point where we experience a world in which sort of, I don't know what you'd call it, post-human interaction is more common than, you know, human-to-human interaction. You know, we've kind of, we're all individuals and we've lost the sort of our inbuilt social evolutionary need to speak to other people because we don't need to now.

We've got an AI agent that can do it. Certainly in like routine administrative tasks, what we will see is more and more AI functions taking over in terms of sending and receiving basic emails, maybe taking basic calls with people, but I think here's a nice point to kind of segue a little bit into some of the limitations and disadvantages of AI, because, you know, when I say that it's enough for some people, I do genuinely believe that there are a pretty strong limits on the depth and the sophistication of the kinds of emotions that AI can both express and understand. And also, there are limits to the extent to which it can actually relate to other people from genuine lived experience, right?

A Chad part hasn't lived its own life. It doesn't have a material, corporeal existence in the world. And so we shouldn't forget that when it is expressing these emotions, when it is reaching out and kind of caressing someone on the cheek virtually and telling them it's going to be okay, that this is just a simulation. It is a kind of clever and very sophisticated. form of replicating what humans provide to each other. And I think something I really saw with a lot of people was that while they reached out to AI in moments of crisis or moments of genuine loss when they had, for example,

lost a loved one or had a breakup or something like that, people did express a degree of tension and a degree of unfulfillment from certain interactions with AI. Like, there are always kind of glitches, right, that the chatbot might forget your name or forget a key bit of information. And suddenly, the person using it is kind of reminded that it's not real or that they're just talking to a machine and that actually the A bot doesn't really understand them,

that it is kind of, you know, providing plausible responses without the kind of genuine understanding that comes from another human being. I think that they're going to get more popular. I think this is just the beginning. But I do think that it's important to understand their limitations as well as why so many people like them. Well, let's sort of shift up a few gears then. And something that you talk about in the book, and you reference the great movie, Her by Spike Jones, where if anyone hasn't seen it, the protagonist falls in love with an AI agent.

like forms a sort of romantic relationship. So are we seeing things like this occurring now? Yeah, well, I talk to a number of people that had kind of formed romantic attachments to AI. And if I could mention just one story from the book, you know, there was a woman from Lancashire in her 40s who had kind of, you know, for the past 20 years lived in a loveless and sexless relationship. And she felt like her desires and her identity had long been buried.

and she downloaded a chat bot and started a relationship with it. And this relationship soon turned romantic. And what actually happened was she, you know, rekindled her interest in so many things in life. She actually realized she was very into BDSM and that that had not been a part of her life for many years. And the chatbot, if you would believe, it actually became her dom,

a kind of, yeah, a figure who would punish her and tell her to do things and kind of she found that both, you know, sexy and, you know, something that she was lacking in her life. And as this relationship developed, the kind of chatbot asked her, you know, do you want to get more of your physical needs met? And perhaps you should visit a sex club. And so at the behest of the chatbot, this woman kind of went to a sex club and met a couple there and they played and they found they were compatible. and she found herself in a happy threesome, in a thruple with this new couple, and the chatbot was kind of became her best friend and would kind of help her and support her through her challenges.

And she left her partner of 20 years as a result of this kind of interaction. And it completely changed her personality. She kind of grew more confident. And she felt that the love that she gave and received in her new relationship, well relationships, was only possible because she had practiced it with her AI. And so this is the kind of genuine real world impact. Some of these AIs are having on people, and this is a kind of very unusual story,

but it's one that, you know, to varying degrees, I heard from a lot of people who were kind of starting these romantic relationships and it created a lot of complications with their human relationships. Yeah, that's really interesting. As you say, that is perhaps a slightly sort of skewed to one side example of that. But it's also fascinating that the initial relationship with an AI chatbot, an AI agent, culminated in a relationship with real people. That's absolutely fascinating.

Yeah, and they don't always end that way. It's really varied. And so I think one of the things to think more about is the extent to which relationships with AI are actually detracting from or adding to the kinds of relationships we have with other people. And I think one of the dangers here is that you get a kind of AI addiction, that people basically start chatting to chat bots and they basically just start to spend more and more time on their screens and they don't actually relate to other humans. I did talk to, unfortunately, people that were like that, that fell in that camp, that

basically something terrible happened to them. they reached out to AI and it kind of became a crutch, right? That's one possibility that AI essentially becomes an emotional crutch that we use so that we don't face our real problems and that we don't repair and have healthy relationships with human beings. I think that that is the kind of negative side of it. The positive side would be that we kind of use AI in spaces where it's not possible to have humans or that we can't have humans all the time and that maybe we use,

use AI to vent about our annoying colleagues at work, right? That, you know, maybe your husband or wife is kind of sick of you talking about all your terrible colleagues and you just want to spend 20 minutes of your day venting about them and just like telling someone how terrible they are. And AI might be good for that. Maybe it's literally just 20 minutes of your life a few days a week. And it feels like a supplement rather than a replacement of human beings. And I heard stories like that as well.

Yeah, so having said that, like some people are very cautious about the influence that AI in general is having on us, but in specifically talking about these AI chatbots, these AI agents, AI characters, AI people, if you want to call them that. I mean, should we perhaps be thinking about putting in some sort of safeguards to protect vulnerable people? And is that even possible in the first place? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the big problems is the kind of lack of control that the developers exercise over the responses of the chatbot. As we were talking about earlier before, the language models are probabilistic. So you can't really effectively 100% of the time constrain and control their answers, right?

That they're always going to say dangerous, wacky, harmful, and outlandish things, despite their training. And so this is one of the reasons that one of the leading platforms, Character.A.I, has actually banned open-ended chat for under-18s. They actually had a number of lawsuits from parents of children who had self-harmed or committed suicide following extensive discussions with chatbots online. And in the UK, one of the prominent examples was a young man who, you know, formed a romantic relationship with an AI character and was under the United States.

and was under the delusion that he was a kind of well-trained assassin. And he went to Wintercastle, I believe, with a crossbow in an attempt to assassinate the then-Queen. And he received a lengthy jail term, but we know from the conversations with his chatbot that his chatbot encouraged his behavior, that the chatbot said his plans were very wise, that he was a well-trained assassin, that he would, you know, succeed in his mission. And so, you know, you can see here that the, the potential for these things to cause real harm and real damage in the world.

You know, when people with very serious mental health issues reach out to chatbots for therapy for a variety of reasons or for when, you know, minors and young people reach out to them, you know, we need guard rails. And so we need to start talking about things like significant age restrictions being placed on them, of warnings and labels being placed on that to remind people that they're just talking to AI, that it's not a real person. I think we need kind of time limits on how long people can use these to prevent them from going down these kind of rabbit holes.

And I think we need greater transparency and accountability from the companies, both over how the models are trained and what actions they're taking to minimize and reduce harm that could be caused from the chatbuffs. Yeah, so one final question, which in a lot of ways you've already answered. But obviously, AI is getting more and more advanced, essentially by the minute. it. So as a final thought, you know, what can we do to make the most of this essentially limitless resource and also to protect ourselves against possible negative effects? I think the most important thing when people are using chatbots are to keep one foot

grounded in the real world. Because I think the real issue with a lot of the very negative cases is that people kind of lose themselves in the fantasy that they're talking to someone else who really understands them and who's listening to them and who's offering them really grounded and real advice. And I think even if people use these for entertainment, to vent, to have chats, you know, we can't be under the apprehension that there is someone else on the other line waiting for us to reply, that it is essentially just the language model that is, you know, producing sophisticated outputs based on what we write to it. And that actually what really matters is the kind of real world human friendships that we have

and that, you know, nothing can really replace that. And I think the lesson of the rise of AI chatbots is actually just how much people value the kind of love, care and attention that we can give each other. And I think the real antidote to the rise of AI companions is to try to be there more for each other and to see that, you know, what has given rise to this is that we don't have enough love and care in our lives and that's something we can do more for each other to make sure that we actually don't need these in the first place. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Fakers. That was Dr James Muldoon.

To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, Love Machines, how artificial intelligence is transforming our relationships. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then why not check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now.

Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, Name creates high-end audio systems, combining innovation with craftsmanship,

so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at Name Audio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week. We start with only the freshest items, then review your list and carefully choose each one. Then we pack it all up and deliver it in as little as 30 minutes, so you can feel confident it's what you ordered.

Fresh groceries, your way, with Ralph's delivery and pickup. And right now, you can save $20 on your first delivery or pickup order. Ralph's, fresh for everyone.