The chance to shop online for fresh meat and produce is coming to a website near you.

Instacart is a grocery delivery service using a decentralized model that allows customers to order groceries online or through a mobile app and have them delivered the same day, within hours, from established stores. Partnered with 190 retailers and grocers, Instacart has personal shoppers pick up the groceries and deliver them to customers.

In Syracuse, the service is available at Costco, Wegmans, Tops Friendly Markets and Price Chopper. And with the recent additions of Sam’s Club and Aldi to Instacart’s arsenal, students can increase the quality of their groceries rather than the quantity of their bills.

Following in the footsteps of Amazon, which announced its acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017, Instacart is rising as a competitor to change the way consumers buy goods. With 210 markets nationwide, a net worth of $4.2 billion and availability in 70 million American and Canadian households, what was once a mere startup is challenging one of the largest global companies.

Amazon, on the other hand, is on a quest to control the entire retail industry. Amazon Prime has disrupted the brick-and-mortar retail world. But little has changed since it acquired Whole Foods, a supermarket chain emphasizing healthy foods with more than 459 locations in the United States. Some stores have been used to test pilot programs for some of Amazon’s ideas, but for most of the Whole Foods locations, it’s business as usual.

Anna Henderson | Digital Design Editor

The pilot program with the largest threat to Instacart is Prime Now, Amazon’s attempt to offer two-hour delivery on groceries from Whole Foods locations. On the surface, this seems like a death sentence for Instacart, but it’s not. Prime Now’s partnership with Whole Foods is still fledging and is only available in a handful of major cities on a trial basis. Even if the program expands to all Whole Foods locations, it’s minor compared to Instacart’s national breadth.

Because its locations lead toward majority-urban areas and its products are pricier than in traditional supermarkets, Whole Foods’ marketability isn’t accessible in cities like Syracuse. But Instacart’s partnership with retail chains across the country provides consumers with options and leverages the established brands of retailers and groceries.

Instacart has an added benefit in cities like Syracuse, which have large populations of people with limited mobility like college students and senior citizens. There are more than 37,000 full-time and part-time college students in the greater Syracuse area, according to CityTownInfo.com, all who are ideal customers for the service.

Still, for Amazon and Instacart, the goal is centered around fundamentally changing the way groceries are bought and sold.

Instacart’s pitch is simple: Let it deliver groceries to your home from the places you trust. To compete, Amazon must convince customers to want their groceries delivered and have them delivered from an unfamiliar retailer.

While Amazon will spend the next few years trying to expand Prime Now to all its Whole Foods locations, Instacart will be busy becoming a household name in cities like Syracuse. This, in the long term, will help give customers — and Instacart — more bang for their digital buck.

Scott Bingle is a sophomore advertising and marketing dual major. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at sabingle@syr.edu.

Published on March 28, 2018 at 9:11 pm