How Instacart Is Helping Grocers Grab Share of Stomach
Instacart is launching a new app experience that makes it possible for shoppers to get hundreds of ready-made meals delivered from their favorite grocer in as fast as 30 minutes.
Instacart customers can shop hundreds of meals via the Ready Meals Hub in the Instacart App, a new in-app destination featuring prepared foods from grocers such as Publix, Giant, Food Lion, Hannaford, Stop & Shop, Martin’s and Kroger. In the coming weeks, ready-made meals from ShopRite will also be featured in the Hub.
From freshly prepared grab-and-go salads and sandwiches from Publix, to soups and sushi from Kroger, to rotisserie chicken from Food Lion, customers across 35 states can now access the Ready Meals Hub to quickly get prepared meals delivered from more than 4,100 grocery stores.
“With our new Ready Meals Hub, we’re dishing up inspiring, more affordable and nutritious food alternatives to restaurant delivery that make it easier for consumers to break up with takeout this year. We’re also helping retailers drive more sales and increase their ‘share of stomach’ when it comes to their customers’ daily mealtime decisions,” said Daniel Danker, head of product of Instacart. “From fresh soups and salads for a quick lunch to take-and-bake casseroles, pasta dishes and meat and seafood entrees for the family dinner, we’re proud to serve as a powerful enablement partner for retailers like Publix, Giant, Food Lion, Hannaford, Stop & Shop, Martin’s and Kroger, creating new ways for them to give busy people and families across the U.S. more ways to shop smart, eat healthy and feed their cravings faster than ever before.”
The timing of Instacart's launch could not be any better. Inflation is at a 40-year high, so consumers have value in mind when it comes to mealtime solutions. Additionally, according to food industry association FMI, ready-made foods can play a big part in people’s daily food prep: most meals in North America are prepared at home (73%), but the majority of these meals involve a combination of prepared and from-scratch elements (55%), and most include time-saving “ready-to-eat” items like pre-made salads and ready-to-eat meat as elements (64%). On the Instacart platform, customers who purchase prepared foods and catering items like hot and cold side dishes, cakes and sushi have significantly larger baskets and shop more frequently than those customers who do not.
The U.S. chilled and deli food market size was expected to reach more than $40 billion as of October 2021 and is projected to reach more than $108 billion by 2026, according to market analytics firm Research and Markets. For retailers, order-ahead items and prepared foods are typically more profitable than traditional groceries such as produce and packaged goods.
The launch of Ready Meals follows Instacart’s recent acquisition of FoodStorm, a SaaS order management system (OMS) that powers end-to-end order-ahead and catering experiences for grocery retailers. FoodStorm’s comprehensive SaaS offering covers multi-channel ordering – e-commerce, phone or in-store kiosk – order management, and payment and fulfillment. Its technology also integrates easily with a large variety of third-party systems including point of sale (POS) systems and offers customer relationship management capabilities that help grocers collect feedback, market their offerings and leverage promotional features. Over the coming months, in addition to expanding FoodStorm’s technology to new partners on the Instacart Marketplace, Instacart expects to expand the Ready Meals Hub to feature several more grocers and will work to make Ready Meals available to more retailers through Instacart’s leading enterprise technology offering.
“Instacart’s solution to showcase prepared meal items is a win for our customers,” said Erik Katenkamp, Publix VP of omnichannel and application development. “In addition to the convenience of being able to order freshly prepared ready-to-eat and ready-to-heat items for rapid delivery, our customers can also pick up a handful of grocery staples with their meal--making it easier than ever to grab lunch and a few items to put together tonight’s dinner, all in a single order.”
Instacart is a leading online grocery platform in North America. Its shoppers offer same-day delivery and pickup services to bring fresh groceries and everyday essentials to busy people and families across the U.S. and Canada. Instacart has partnered with more than 700 national, regional and local retailers, including unique brand names, to deliver from more than 65,000 stores across more than 5,500 cities in North America. Instacart’s platform is available to over 85% of U.S. households and 90% of Canadian households.
