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
Instacart, the leading grocery technology company in North America, 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 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 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.