Instacart personalizes online grocery shopping via AI
Instacart is leveraging next-generation artificial intelligence to provide shoppers with relevant products and health information.
The grocery technology company is introducing Smart Shop, a technology platform based on generative AI and machine learning designed to create a more personalized grocery shopping experience by analyzing customer habits and dietary preferences to surface the most relevant products faster.
How Smart Shop works
Based on the Instacart catalog of 17 million unique items and its proprietary dataset of customer behavior, Smart Shop applies behavior analysis and affinity modeling to analyze real-world shopping habits, and identify patterns in user preferences.
To further refine analysis, Smart Shop leverages large language models (LLMs) to identify the best signals for predicting preferences to enhance accuracy. For example, LLMs can analyze product categories and detect intent-based patterns in user behavior, such as identifying the purchase of deliberate low-carbohydrate items and filtering out irrelevant signals like purchases of naturally low-carb foods.
By automating the identification of meaningful patterns, LLMs can reduce the time and effort required to create accurate, scalable predictions while also enabling more precise and personalized recommendations, even in scenarios they haven’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 and 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, ML models and LLM reasoning, are intended to continuously sharpen Smart Shop's ability to predict user needs and refine recommendations.
Customers can also modify their shopping preferences, selecting from 14 unique dietary preferences, such as gluten-free. Through Smart Shop preferences, customers can also share household details, like whether they're also shopping for a baby, toddler or pet. All of these inputs can help Smart Shop personalization of search results.
"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 Daniel Danker, chief product officer at Instacart.
Health tags
Instacart is also introducing a new AI-based health tag system, which scans product data at scale to extract key nutrition characteristics. This multimodal AI platform leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to extract rich product attributes from text and images to enable tagging of nutrition claims, ingredients and dietary labels.
Using this model, Instacart has tagged over 1.3 billion data points across food and beverage products in its catalog and health tags currently provide transparent, easy-to-digest details on approximately 500,000 items across the more than 100,000 stores on the Instacart platform.
Inspiration pages
Other new features include inspiration pages, which are curated destinations within the Instacart digital customer experience that make expert nutrition advice and recommended recipes shoppable. The first page, launched in collaboration with the American Diabetes Assocation, help customers find foods that align with their diabetes-related health goals.
Instacart plans to continue expanding Inspiration Pages, launching new shoppable experiences based on Smart Shop preferences like high fiber and high protein, and partnering with additional organizations to bring more expert-backed guidance onto the platform. These pages will provide consumers with curated product selections and tailored recommendations.
"Instacart is making it easier for people to shop for nutritious foods that support their health goals and lifestyle," said Sarah Mastrorocco, VP and GM of Instacart Health. “Whether you're managing a chronic condition like diabetes or simply looking to make more informed food choices, we're here to help make grocery shopping simpler and more personalized."
Instacart and ADA have also worked together to build a turnkey nutrition program for healthcare partners, using Instacart Health Fresh Funds (Instacart virtual grocery stipends)and customized by the ADA to cover foods informed by ADA standards.
[READ MORE: Instacart offers health-driven shopping options]
Instacart partners with more than 1,800 national, regional, and local retail banners to facilitate online shopping, delivery and pickup services from more than 100,000 stores across North America on the Instacart Marketplace.
