Prospectus Prospectus
Instacart got huge. It’s going public. Now how will it grow?
Analyzing the online grocery service’s S-1 filing.
By Dan Frommer on Thursday, September 7, 2023 at 8:00 am
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If Amazon is trying to build the iPhone of the grocery industry, I wrote in 2019, Instacart is building the Android.
The idea behind my smartphone analogy was that Instacart, the grocery delivery service, was building an operating system and e-commerce platform that any grocery retailer could use to credibly sell online — putting them on nearly the same footing as their giant, more vertically integrated competitors, Amazon and Walmart.
A lot has changed in the world since then, and Amazon’s execution in online grocery has hardly been iPhone-like in its elegance or success.
But Instacart’s platform and marketplace approach has worked — it’s huge, and it’s doing well:
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Hi, I’m Dan Frommer and this is The New Consumer, a publication about how and why people spend their time and money.
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