AI guidance in the breakfast aisle: How Wholey uses branchly to bring clarity to its product range

Key facts at a glance

Wholey, a provider of plant-based breakfast products at wholey.de, has integrated branchly's AI chat into its website. Since June 2025, the chat has been answering questions about products, ingredients, nutritional values, preparation, and availability directly on the website and at the point of purchase. During the stable operating phase from November 2025 to June 2026, 92.3 percent of all inquiries were fully answered. Sessions in which customers use the chat result in a shopping cart 14.0 percent of the time, sessions without chat 6.1 percent. The chat thus measurably increases conversions.

Why a growing product range becomes a hurdle

Wholey has greatly expanded its product range over the past few years. Anyone landing on wholey.de today will find, alongside classics such as Chillo Pillows and Space Flakes, a constant stream of new flavors, limited editions, bundle offers, and matching spreads. For regular customers, that is an advantage; for new customers, it can quickly become overwhelming. Many do not know where to start, which products are vegan and gluten-free, or how the different muesli varieties differ in taste.

The result: customers keep asking support the same questions or leave the shop because they cannot find the right product. And 21.4 percent of all conversations take place outside regular service hours, between 8 pm and 8 am, when no support team is available.

From shop to AI-assisted shopping

Wholey relies on Shopify as its shop system. The decision in favor of branchly was made partly because of the easy integration: the chat can be embedded into the existing website without major technical effort and draws its knowledge directly from the product catalog, ingredients, nutrition declarations, and preparation instructions. Unlike classic rule-based bots that react to predefined keywords, the chat understands natural language and answers questions individually.

The chat is context-aware. It knows which product page a visitor is currently viewing, which items they have viewed previously, and which questions have already been asked. This allows it to serve relevant content in a targeted way, such as a suitable alternative for customers who land on a muesli page but are actually looking for crunchy granola. Or it explains the differences between two cereals when a customer is wavering between several variants. Through dynamically generated entry questions on every page, the chat proactively starts conversations: 51.1 percent of all inquiries come through these suggested questions. The guidance is therefore actively initiated, not just reactively provided.

Overall, the chat answers 4,837 different questions without having to be retrained, with an average of 436 characters per answer. The knowledge is retrieved live from the product catalog; updates to items or ingredients are immediately available, with no separate maintenance process required.

What the chat delivers in everyday use

The integration targets the conversion rate. People shopping at Wholey are often close to a decision but still need that final nudge. The chat provides it by comparing products, recommending suitable alternatives, and answering questions about shipping, storage, or preparation in real time. 1,541 conversations per quarter run through the chat, with no wait time and around the clock.

Customers ask about vegan and gluten-free options, differences between varieties, and preparation options. These are exactly the questions that arise at the moment when the purchase decision is still open.

Sessions in which customers use the chat result in a shopping cart 14.0 percent of the time, sessions without chat 6.1 percent. The chat thus measurably increases conversions.

Beyond the purchase itself, Wholey learns from every dialogue. Every question a customer asks is a signal: Where does product selection get stuck? Which features are decisive? Which varieties are being compared with each other? The chat has answered more than 4,837 different questions since its launch. They show Wholey exactly what customers are really looking for, which ingredients they check, and where the product range overview is insufficient at the outset. These insights flow directly back into product pages, descriptions, and category sorting, even before anyone contacts support.

Customer dialogue in numbers

The figures come from the stable operating phase of the Wholey application:

The answer quality of 92.3 percent is above the upper benchmark range for tightly integrated AI chat solutions in e-commerce, which typically ranges between 70 and 85 percent. Conventional rule-based bots achieve only 20 to 40 percent at the median. Only 1.1 percent of inquiries remained unanswered during the observation period.

What other e-commerce providers can learn from this

The Wholey implementation reveals three insights for online shops with a growing product range. First: questions that precede the purchase decision are the lever for conversion. Customers who are wavering between two cereals are more likely to buy when the differences are explained to them in real time instead of having to piece together comparisons themselves. Second: demand remains unabated outside service hours. More than one in five conversations takes place in the evening and at night, precisely when no human support is available. An AI chat that responds fully during this time closes a gap that would otherwise lead to abandoned purchases. Third: anyone who actively initiates the chat instead of just waiting reactively brings more customers into the dialogue. More than 51 percent of inquiries at Wholey start through suggested questions that the chat proactively serves.