Instacart Launches AI-Powered 'Smart Shop' Technology and New Features to Enhance App Personalization, Making It Easier for Customers to Make Healthier, More Informed Choices

Rhea-AI Summary

Instacart (NASDAQ: CART) has unveiled 'Smart Shop,' an AI-powered technology that personalizes grocery shopping experiences. The system analyzes customer habits and dietary preferences to provide relevant product recommendations across its 17 million-item catalog.

The company introduced three key features:

• Smart Shop technology - Uses AI and machine learning to analyze shopping patterns and customize recommendations
• Health Tags - AI-driven system providing nutrition information across 500,000 items with 1.3 billion data points
• Inspiration Pages - Curated destinations featuring expert nutrition advice, launching first with the American Diabetes Association

The platform now offers 14 dietary preference options and 30 Health Tags to help users make informed choices. According to Instacart's survey, over 70% of users have at least one dietary preference.

Positive

• Implementation of advanced AI technology to enhance user experience and potentially increase customer retention
• Partnership with American Diabetes Association expands market reach to health-conscious consumers
• Coverage of 17 million unique items across 100,000+ stores demonstrates strong market presence
• 70% of users have dietary preferences, indicating strong potential for new feature adoption

Negative

• Significant investment in AI technology development may increase operating expenses
• Complex AI implementation could face technical challenges or user adoption barriers

Insights

Technology Analyst

Instacart's new AI-powered Smart Shop technology represents a significant competitive advancement that leverages the company's unique data assets to create a personalized shopping experience. By combining 17 million unique catalog items with patterns from millions of shopping journeys, Instacart is building a substantial data moat that smaller competitors can't easily replicate.

The sophisticated AI implementation is particularly noteworthy - using Large Language Models (LLMs) to identify true user intent rather than surface-level patterns. For example, distinguishing between routine purchases of naturally low-carb items versus deliberate low-carb choices demonstrates an advanced understanding of consumer behavior that goes beyond basic recommendation engines.

The new Health Tags system further extends this advantage by using vision-language models to extract nutritional information across approximately half a million items, addressing the 70% of Instacart users with dietary preferences. This multimodal AI approach processing 1.3 billion data points across the catalog represents a significant technological investment that should improve user engagement metrics.

What makes this implementation particularly valuable is how it transforms complex AI technology into practical consumer benefits - removing friction from the shopping experience while making personalization feel natural rather than intrusive. The system's ability to adapt in real-time and proactively engage users when confidence in preferences is low demonstrates thoughtful UX design layered on sophisticated technology.

Healthcare Industry Specialist

Instacart's collaboration with the American Diabetes Association signals an important strategic expansion beyond pure grocery delivery into the healthcare and nutrition space. This partnership addresses a substantial market need - nearly half of American adults manage at least one preventable chronic disease linked to diet.

What's particularly valuable about this initiative is its comprehensive approach. Rather than simply tagging "diabetes-friendly" products, Instacart is creating a complete ecosystem through Inspiration Pages that make expert nutrition recommendations actionable through seamless shopping integration.

The institutional healthcare opportunity represents a potential new revenue vector. The turnkey nutrition program using Instacart Health Fresh Funds could position the company as a valuable partner for health plans and providers looking to incorporate nutritious food access into chronic disease management. This effectively opens doors to institutional purchasing relationships beyond the consumer market.

This move aligns with growing recognition among healthcare stakeholders that food access and nutrition guidance are essential components of effective chronic disease management. By bridging the gap between clinical recommendations and practical food choices, Instacart potentially creates value for multiple stakeholders: consumers gain easier access to appropriate foods, healthcare providers gain implementation tools for dietary recommendations, and payers potentially benefit from improved health outcomes.

The timing during National Nutrition Month demonstrates savvy positioning that should enhance Instacart's credibility in the healthcare and nutrition space while differentiating the platform from competitors who remain focused solely on delivery logistics.

Instacart now offers more personalized recommendations based on preferences and provides clear nutrition and dietary information at consumers' fingertips

New collaboration with the American Diabetes Association simplifies healthier shopping with expert nutrition guidance, product recommendations, and shoppable recipes to inform and guide consumers

SAN FRANCISCO, March 18, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Instacart (NASDAQ: CART), the leading grocery technology company in North America, today introduced Smart Shop, which leverages cutting-edge generative AI and machine learning to create a more personalized grocery shopping experience. With Smart Shop, Instacart is making online grocery shopping more intuitive by analyzing customer habits and dietary preferences to surface the most relevant products faster.

In addition to Smart Shop, Instacart unveiled new AI-powered Health Tags, which provide detailed and transparent nutritional information across the catalog, and Inspiration Pages, curated destinations within the Instacart experience featuring expert-backed health recommendations and shoppable recipes. The first Inspiration Page was developed in collaboration with the American Diabetes Association® (ADA) and features evidence-based nutrition guidance and diabetes-friendly grocery and recipe recommendations. Launched to coincide with National Nutrition Month, these offerings make it easier for consumers to discover relevant products based on their unique health and lifestyle preferences on Instacart.

"At Instacart, we want to turn the ordinary task of grocery shopping into a delightful, personalized shopping experience that takes the mental load out of finding the exact items that meet your preferences," said Daniel Danker, Chief Product Officer at Instacart. "By combining our new Smart Shop technology, Health Tags and Inspiration Pages, we're not just improving online grocery shopping – we're reimagining it, making it seamless to go from intention to action. By customizing your shopping journey to match your personal health goals or fit your dietary restrictions, we can unlock possibilities that weren't even on the table before."

Instacart's latest features enable consumers to shop according to their unique dietary and household preferences, simplifying the process of finding relevant products and making more informed grocery choices:

• Smart Shop technology – Powered by Instacart's industry-leading catalog of 17 million unique items and its proprietary dataset of millions of grocery shopping journeys, Smart Shop leverages unparalleled insights into nuanced consumer behaviors in a way that no other grocery marketplace can. Instacart's Smart Shop technology applies behavior analysis and affinity modeling to analyze real-world shopping habits, identifying patterns in user preferences with high precision. To further refine this understanding, large language models (LLMs) improve personalization by identifying the most valuable signals for predicting preferences to enhance accuracy.
  
  For example, inferring a customer's preference for low-carb products is complex because many everyday items are naturally low in carbohydrates, making it difficult to determine true intent. Traditional machine learning models rely on large datasets and extensive feature engineering to differentiate between routine purchases and deliberate low-carb choices. Items like almond flour or cauliflower rice strongly indicate a low-carb preference, whereas staples like chicken breast, though low in carbs, are less indicative of intent in this context. LLMs simplify this process by analyzing product categories and detecting intent-based patterns in user behavior. They pinpoint deliberate low-carb choices and filter out noise from irrelevant signals like purchases of naturally low-carb items. By automating the identification of meaningful patterns, LLMs eliminate the need for exhaustive tagging and manual feature engineering, drastically reducing the time and effort required to create highly accurate, scalable predictions, while also enabling more precise and personalized recommendations – even in scenarios it hasn't been explicitly trained on.
  
  As users shop, Smart Shop evolves its understanding in real time, dynamically adjusting digital aisles to prioritize the most relevant products based on inferred preferences, while seamlessly adapting to changing behaviors over time. When confidence in a preference is low, Smart Shop proactively engages users with clarifying questions like, "Show more low-carb options?" These interactions, combined with Instacart's proprietary shopping data, advanced ML models and LLM reasoning, continuously sharpen Smart Shop's ability to predict user needs and refine recommendations. By combining structured insights with pre-trained AI, this advanced approach drives unparalleled precision and truly personalized grocery experiences.
  
  
• Customizable Smart Shop preferences – To further tailor the Smart Shop experience, customers can modify their shopping preferences, selecting from 14 unique dietary preferences, including gluten free, high protein, high fiber, lactose free, low calorie, low carb, low sodium, low sugar, low fat, organic, pescatarian, preservative free, vegan and vegetarian. Through Smart Shop preferences, customers can explicitly share household details, like whether they're also shopping for a baby, toddler or pet. All of these inputs enhance Smart Shop personalization, helping surface items and aisles on Instacart that better align with each person's dietary and household preferences.
  
  
• New Health Tags – According to a recent Instacart customer survey, more than 70% of users have at least one dietary preference.¹ To help them navigate grocery options with ease, Instacart developed an AI-driven Health Tag system, which scans product data at scale to extract key nutrition characteristics. This multimodal AI platform leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to extract rich product attributes from text and images to enable rapid, high accuracy tagging of nutrition claims, ingredients and dietary labels. Using this model, Instacart has tagged over 1.3 billion data points across food and beverage products in its catalog and today, Health Tags provide transparent easy-to-digest details on approximately half a million items across the more than 100,000 stores on the Instacart platform. Instacart's 30 Health Tags now include gluten free, grass fed, heart healthy, high fiber, high protein, keto, lactose free, minimally processed, pasture raised, preservative free, no artificial colors, no artificial flavors, non-GMO, vegetarian, vegan, wild caught and more, helping consumers easily view and filter items based on their preferences, discover new products and make more informed shopping decisions.
  
  
• Inspiration Pages – Instacart is also introducing Inspiration Pages, curated destinations within the Instacart experience that make expert nutrition advice and recommended recipes shoppable. The first page launched in collaboration with the ADA simplifies shopping for people living with prediabetes, diabetes, and obesity – while also supporting anyone looking to make healthier grocery choices. By making trusted nutrition guidance easily accessible, Inspiration Pages help customers find foods that align with their health goals. With nearly half of all American adults managing at least one preventable chronic disease linked to diet and lifestyle, access to reliable nutrition resources has never been more important.² Instacart plans to continue expanding Inspiration Pages, launching new shoppable experiences based on Smart Shop preferences like high fiber and high protein, and partnering with additional organizations to bring more expert-backed guidance onto the platform. These pages will provide consumers with curated product selections and tailored recommendations, making it even easier to find foods that align with their preferences and goals.

Through AI-powered personalization, advanced preference detection, and rapid product attribute extraction, customers can use Instacart to seamlessly shop for products that align with their health goals, turning grocery shopping into a smarter, more intuitive experience.

"Instacart is making it easier for people to shop for nutritious foods that support their health goals and lifestyle. With Smart Shop technology and Health Tags, we're giving consumers the power to personalize their experience, with tools to filter and discover the best options for their unique preferences," said Sarah Mastrorocco, Vice President and General Manager of Instacart Health. "Our collaboration with the American Diabetes Association takes this a step further by turning expert nutrition advice into easy, shoppable solutions through our Inspiration Pages. Whether you're managing a chronic condition like diabetes or simply looking to make more informed food choices, we're here to help make grocery shopping simpler and more personalized."

Instacart and ADA have also worked together to build a turnkey nutrition program for healthcare partners, using Instacart Health Fresh Funds customized by the ADA to cover foods informed by their Standards of Care in Diabetes. This new resource enables organizations like health plans and providers to adopt the Fresh Funds program and refer patients to the ADA Inspiration Page for reliable, actionable nutrition guidance, making it simpler to integrate nutritious food into chronic disease treatment and management at scale. Using both the ADA Inspiration Page and Fresh Funds, healthcare organizations can now seamlessly connect members and patients with the shoppable, trusted content that encourages practical, everyday food choices.

About Instacart
Instacart, the leading grocery technology company in North America, works with grocers and retailers to transform how people shop. The company partners with more than 1,800 national, regional, and local retail banners to facilitate online shopping, delivery and pickup services from more than 100,000 stores across North America on the Instacart Marketplace. Instacart makes it possible for millions of people to get the groceries they need from the retailers they love, and for approximately 600,000 Instacart shoppers to earn by picking, packing and delivering orders on their own flexible schedule. The Instacart Platform offers retailers a suite of enterprise-grade technology products and services to power their e-commerce experiences, fulfill orders, digitize brick-and-mortar stores, provide advertising services, and glean insights. With Instacart Ads, thousands of CPG brands – from category leaders to emerging brands – partner with the company to connect directly with consumers online, right at the point of purchase. With Instacart Health, the company is providing tools to increase nutrition security, make healthy choices easier for consumers, and expand the role that food can play in improving health outcomes. For more information, visit www.instacart.com/company, and to start shopping, visit www.instacart.com. Maplebear Inc. is the registered corporate name of Instacart.

1 Instacart Customer Survey, conducted Q3 2023. 2 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2024, October 4). About chronic diseases. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-disease/about/index.html

 

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SOURCE Maplebear Inc. dba Instacart

FAQ

What new AI features did Instacart (CART) launch in March 2025?

Instacart launched Smart Shop AI technology, Health Tags, and Inspiration Pages to provide personalized shopping recommendations and nutrition information.

How many items does Instacart's Smart Shop AI technology analyze?

Smart Shop analyzes Instacart's catalog of 17 million unique items across more than 100,000 stores.

What is the coverage of Instacart's Health Tags system?

Health Tags provide nutrition information for approximately 500,000 items, processing 1.3 billion data points across food and beverage products.

How many dietary preferences does Instacart's Smart Shop technology support?

Smart Shop supports 14 unique dietary preferences, including gluten-free, high protein, vegan, and vegetarian options.

Who is Instacart's first partner for their new Inspiration Pages feature?

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) is the first partner, providing diabetes-friendly grocery and recipe recommendations.