Instacart Distributes Employee Safety Kits

Instacart is distributing free health and safety kits to full-service shoppers during the COVID-19 outbreak. These kits include face masks, hand sanitizer and thermometers to help keep the company's shoppers safe as they're in and out of grocery stores and delivering items to customers.

"We want to provide customers with an essential service they can rely on to get their groceries and household goods, while also offering safe and flexible earnings opportunities to Instacart personal shoppers," said Nilam Ganenthiran, president of San Francisco-based Instacart. "As COVID-19 evolves, today's health and safety solutions will be tomorrow's table stakes, and our teams are working quickly to introduce new services and features to ensure our shopper community is supported as this situation unfolds."

Instacart has launched a COVID-19 Resource Center to share details of how the company is responding to the crisis. These changes come after some Instacart shoppers publicly shared their disappointment in how the company was handling the situation.  

The health and safety kits are available on a website specifically for the shopper community beginning in the coming week. For in-store shoppers, Instacart also will be directly distributing face masks at retail locations where the company has in-store operations. 

The face mask is a washable and reusable cloth that doesn't impact the health care and medical community's supply. The hand sanitizer is ethyl alchol-based and exceeds the CDC's guidance. The reusable forehead thermometer provides a temperature check in approximately 15 seconds. 

Instacart continues massive hiring efforts during this time, hoping to bring aboard an additional 300,000 shoppers to keep up with demand.