Executive Briefing
Why Instacart matters
If Amazon is trying to build the iPhone of the grocery industry, Instacart is the Android.
By Dan Frommer on Friday, May 17, 2019 at 2:47 pm
This Wednesday marked the end of an era: Instacart, the online grocery shopping and delivery startup, officially stopped working with Whole Foods, almost two years after Amazon purchased the organic grocery chain. While both companies have moved on, their high-profile partnership, which launched in 2014, put Instacart on the map and led many people — including me! — to make their first online grocery purchases.
This as grocery e-commerce in the US is finally starting to pick up, representing “just 5% of the roughly $1 trillion US food and consumer-product market” — per Nielsen, via the WSJ — yet “online sales are growing 40% annually, while in-store sales have been flat for years.” Some 19% of Americans said they were online grocery shoppers last year, up from 5% in 2015, according to a survey by RBC Capital Markets.
Amazon and Walmart are aggressively building out their online grocery businesses, and racing to outdo each other with faster shipping speeds, eager to steal share from incumbents and each other. But right now, most Americans still buy most of their groceries from the grocery store. And that is where Instacart comes into play.
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