Instacart Makes grocery shopping more personal, accessible with new AI Features
San Francisco-based grocery delivery company Instacart issued a press release earlier this week in which the company announced its so-called “Smart Shop” feature. The functionality, which Instacart says is powered by artificial intelligence, is touted to “[offer] more personalized recommendations based on preferences and provides clear nutrition and dietary information at consumers’ fingertips.” With Smart Shop, Instacart said, the company is “making online grocery shopping more intuitive by analyzing customer habits and dietary preferences to surface the most relevant products faster.”
Besides Smart Shop, Instacart introduced something it calls Health Tags. The product of a collaboration with the American Diabetes Association, Instacart describes the feature as “[providing] 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 company noted Health Tags, which it says uses evidence-based guidance and recommendations, is being released coincident with National Nutrition Month. According to Instacart, are purposely designed to assist customers with “[discovering] 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,” Daniel Danker, Instacart’s chief product officer, said in a statement for the company’s announcement. “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.”
Smart Shop and Health Tags “enable consumers to shop according to their unique dietary and household preferences, [which simplify] the process of finding relevant products and making more informed grocery choices.” As to Smart Shop specifically, Instacart says it’s powered by an “industry-leading catalog” of 17 million unique items, alongside a “proprietary dataset” comprising “millions of grocery shopping journeys.”
Over 70% have at least one dietary preference, according to a recent Instacart survey.
This week’s news of Smart Shop serves as a good reminder of how Instacart is beneficial to accessibility in multiple ways. I’ve covered the company in the past, and the most obvious benefit to using them is the fact someone does the shopping for you before delivering the goods to your doorstep. Although certainly convenient, the reality is Instacart can be a godsend to those in the disability community who are immobile—whether physically, logistically, or some combination thereof—and thus literally cannot (or should not) venture out to do their own shopping. This use case extends far beyond sheer amenity; Instacart’s existence means a disabled person has access to the things they need for day-to-day sustenance and survival. By the same token, Instacart’s guidance and recommendation engine is yet another example of AI’s profound potential to do genuine good for people. It’s entirely plausible these new features from Instacart helps a disabled person make better purchasing decisions so as to be in better alignment with whatever condition(s) they cope with on the daily. Moreover, from a cognition standpoint, the personalized information work wonders in alleviating the mental load of not only having a shopping list, but more crucially, finding the items within the store’s digital aisles. In-person grocery shopping isn’t a task for the weary.
Of course, the overarching reason for Instacart’s potential for greater accessibility lies in technology—specifically the smartphone. Disabled people use smartphones too, and Instacart’s app—available on iOS and Android—is one more tool with which to make life easier and more accessible. In very much the same ways Facebook makes socialization with far-flung family and friends more accessible, or how on-demand Uber and Waymo rides makes getting around town more accessible, Instacart can make getting groceries less burdensome due to the modern smartphone’s superpowers.
