Instacart Upgrades Fulfillment and Picking Options for Grocers

Instacart has introduced what it calls two major updates to its fulfillment platform.

“As grocery retailers scale their ecommerce and fulfillment operations, many are still managing picking, delivery, and labor across disconnected systems, creating unnecessary complexity for store teams and inconsistent customer experiences,” the company said in a Tuesday (May 12) blog post .

With that in mind, Instacart says it has added new delivery management software for retailer-owned fleets to its Fulfillment Pro offering, as well as improved “enhanced enterprise-grade” picking capabilities for store employees.

“Retailers have made real investments in their ecommerce programs, and they need fulfillment tools that can scale with them,” Blake Wallace, Instacart’s vice president of retail partnerships, said in the release.

“Fulfillment Pro brings picking, labor, and last-mile delivery into one system – giving retailers more control over their operations while helping them run more efficiently and deliver better experiences for their customers.”

Instacart is making these changes at a time when consumers are increasingly doing their grocery buying through virtual channels.

As covered here earlier this year, research by PYMNTS Intelligence shows that shoppers feeling high levels of financial stress spent an average of $109 on their most recent grocery purchase, versus $95 among low-stress shoppers. This result indicates fewer trips and more deliberate planning, rather than looser spending discipline.

“Digital channels amplify this behavior,” PYMNTS wrote. “Financially stressed shoppers appear to favor online grocery purchases for the control they offer, including easier price comparisons and access to promotions. In-store grocery shopping still plays a role, but the growth momentum is clearly digital for this group.”

The research also found these shoppers were more likely to patronize Walmart than Amazon. The overall trend towards online grocery buying, the report added, “reflects a broader shift toward deliberate spending, consolidation and value orientation.”

PYMNTS wrote last week about Instacart’s latest earnings, which show that the company is turning a decade of grocery data into an artificial intelligence system that plans meals, builds shoppers’ baskets and predicts what they might have overlooked.

“With 1.6 billion lifetime orders and a fulfillment network rooted in physical stores, Instacart is building what its CEO Chris Rogers called the gold standard of agentic grocery AI,” that report said. “Instacart runs on three engines, including a consumer marketplace, an enterprise platform for retailers and an advertising ecosystem for brands. Each is growing — and more importantly, growing each other.”