Picnic MCP Server

picnic-mcp

An MCP server for the online supermarket Picnic. It lets a model search Picnic's products, fill your shopping cart, pick a delivery slot, show promotions and the products you usually buy, and use recipes. It can't place an order.

Unofficial: not made or supported by Picnic. Built on picnic-api. Tested with Dutch accounts; German and French accounts should work, but haven't been tested.

Part of a set

picnic-api, picnic-web and picnic-mcp are developed and released together. When the Picnic app changes how it gets its data, picnic-api follows it and picnic-web and picnic-mcp are updated in the same change, so their latest versions always work together.

Tools

The tools come in groups. cart, slots, product and discover are on by default; turn groups on or off with PICNIC_MCP_TOOLS (see Setup).

Output is compact JSON with only what a model needs. It leaves out your name, address, payment details, order numbers and other account details. Keep in mind that whatever the tools return is sent to the model your MCP client uses.

When a search has no clear match and your MCP client can show a form (elicitation), you pick the product in the client yourself, instead of the model asking you in the chat.

Setup

Requires Node.js 20 or later.

1. Get an auth key

npx picnic-mcp login

It asks for your country, email and password, and the code Picnic texts you when your account uses two-factor authentication. It prints an auth key and stores nothing. Keep the key secret: it gives access to your Picnic account.

2. Add the server to your MCP client

Claude Desktop and other MCPB clients: download picnic-mcp.mcpb from the latest release, open it, and fill in the auth key.

Other clients take a configuration like this:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "picnic": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "picnic-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "PICNIC_AUTH_KEY": "<your auth key>",
        "PICNIC_COUNTRY_CODE": "NL"
      }
    }
  }
}

PICNIC_COUNTRY_CODE is NL, DE or FR (default NL). To choose the tool groups, add PICNIC_MCP_TOOLS with a comma-separated list, e.g. "cart,slots,product,discover,deliveries,recipes" (default cart,slots,product,discover). Fewer tools help smaller models pick the right one. The server runs over stdio; see HTTP to reach it over the network.

The server is also listed in the MCP Registry as io.github.MRVDH/picnic-mcp.

When the key expires, the tools say so; run npx picnic-mcp login again.

HTTP

picnic-mcp http serves the same tools over HTTP at /mcp, for clients that connect to a URL. It needs a token that clients send as Authorization: Bearer <token>; generate one with:

openssl rand -hex 32

PICNIC_AUTH_KEY=<auth key> PICNIC_MCP_HTTP_TOKEN=<token> npx picnic-mcp http

The server doesn't do HTTPS. To use it from another machine, put it behind a reverse proxy with HTTPS, and add the proxy's host name to PICNIC_MCP_HTTP_ALLOWED_HOSTS.

Use it in your own code

createServer returns the MCP server without reading environment variables or files, so you can run it in your own process and connect it to any MCP transport:

import { createServer } from "picnic-mcp";

const server = createServer({ authKey: "<auth key>", countryCode: "NL" });
await server.connect(transport);

Pass tools to choose the tool groups (e.g. tools: ["cart", "recipes"]), client instead of authKey to use a picnic-api client you already have, and onError to handle errors from Picnic yourself (by default they're logged to stderr).

Product images

Results that list products (search, the cart, added products, promotions, favorites, product details) carry the image URLs of those products in _meta["picnic-mcp/images"], by product id. MCP clients don't pass _meta to the model, so the images cost no tokens; your own code can use them, e.g. to show product photos. The images don't need the auth key. The key is exported as IMAGES_META_KEY.