Grocery Technology Company Invites Third Parties to Join The New York Times, WeightWatchers and GE Appliances in New API Program
SAN FRANCISCO, March 27, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Instacart (NASDAQ:CART), the leading grocery technology company in North America, today announced the launch of the Instacart Developer Platform (IDP), a new publicly available API program which uses Instacart’s industry-leading online grocery platform to supercharge third-party digital experiences across food, health, wellness, and many other spaces. IDP will enable third parties to integrate the functionality of Instacart inside their websites and apps, and over time, will unlock:
- Same-day fulfillment of over a billion unique products in as fast as 30 minutes from 85,000 stores across more than 1,500 national, regional, and local retail banners
- Access to Instacart’s rich item catalog, which includes attributes like ingredient and nutrition information, size, and more – the building blocks needed to create customizable meal plans, recipes, shopping lists, and other full-service lifestyle experiences
- Real-time understanding of what’s on store shelves from each customer’s favorite local retailer
Powering the Next Generation of Full-Service Food, Wellness and Lifestyle Experiences
Right now, there is an explosion of innovative developers and companies building compelling app and web-based experiences in food and other spaces – from meal planning and cooking inspiration to navigating dietary and health needs to interactive beauty apps. While many of these new companies are able to leverage emerging tech like generative AI to create compelling products, most don’t have a way to build functionality that gets people the food, household items, and other essentials they need to turn the guidance and inspiration they’re getting into action.
For example, a customer of a meal planning app may open the app and come up with a plan for what they want to cook, or patients using a healthcare app may browse digital nutrition plans specific to a dietary need or disease. But before these users can make anything, they need to write down the ingredients, drive to the grocery store, pick them out, and bring them home – creating an imperfect customer experience ripe for improvement. With integration via IDP, those same customers can now click a button to pick their favorite local retailer, add those ingredients to a digital cart, and enjoy a robust delivery experience including things like real-time delivery updates and replacement alerts.
“With the launch of the Instacart Developer Platform, we’re taking over a decade of technology we’ve built to power the Instacart marketplace and top retailer storefronts, and offering it to a broader range of businesses, turning discovery-centric apps into full service experiences that can also deliver tangible goods,” said Daniel Danker, Chief Product Officer and Head of Online Grocery at Instacart. “This enables mainstream services as well as new products born out of emerging AI capabilities to offer truly complete experiences for their customers.”
