The Instacart Developer Platform – A New Way to Turn Inspiration Into Action

Today, we announced the Instacart Developer Platform (IDP), a publicly available API program which uses our 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

Say you have a meal planning app focused on their dietary restrictions. Your customers open the app, look around, and come up with a plan for what they want to cook. Or you’re a healthcare company giving patients digital nutrition plans specific to a dietary need or disease. Before these people can actually make anything, they have to write down the ingredients, drive to the grocery store, pick them out, and bring them home. It’s an imperfect customer experience ripe for improvement.

That’s where Instacart comes in. Now that same customer can click a button to pick their favorite local store, add those ingredients to a digital cart, and enjoy a robust delivery experience including things like real-time delivery updates and replacement alerts. 

Powering the Next Generation of Full-Service Food, Wellness and Lifestyle Experiences

Right now, there is an explosion of innovative developers and companies doing different, interesting things in food and other spaces – from meal planning and cooking instruction 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.

At Instacart, we’ve always been focused on helping grocery retailers navigate the digital transformation so they can serve their customers better.  But we know the world of food goes beyond the walls of Instacart – and while we can’t build everything, our platform means that we can power everything, helping companies of all sizes serve their customers even better. With the launch of IDP, we’re now taking the technology we’ve built for retail partners and offering it to a broader range of businesses, turning discovery-centric apps and websites into full service experiences that can also deliver tangible goods and offer a truly complete experience for their customers. 

By joining IDP, over time developers will have access to a rich set of catalog, search, cart-building, fulfillment, and self-service tools. With those tools, they’ll be able to build connected experiences that span meal planning, personalized nutrition, cooking, content creation, health, entertainment, beauty, travel, and more.

For developers, it will be a way to allow customers to order from Instacart using inspiration from their own apps — creating a better experience and opening up new monetization avenues like affiliate commissions.

For retailers and brands, IDP is a zero-cost way to attract new customers, drive incremental order volume, unlock new surfaces for targeted ad placements, and connect with new customers at the moment they’re ready to make purchases.

Finally, for Instacart, it’s a way to help new customers discover the convenience of ordering groceries online, and allow our existing customers to connect Instacart to their favorite apps. 

In other words, IDP is about working with our partners to do more together than any of us can do on our own.

That’s what we’re doing with more than a dozen launch partners, who will launch IDP integrations over the coming months. 

Coming Soon: Connected Shopping Features from Instacart Platform Launch Partners

New York Times Cooking makes everyday cooking simple with recipes created by, tested and perfected by experienced and trusted editors and recipe creators, and rated highly by a community of engaged home cooks. Beloved by its audience, more than 100 million people visited the site and app in 2023. This integration will allow New York Times Cooking users to shop recipe ingredients via Instacart, making it faster and easier to get a delicious dinner on the table.

WeightWatchers is #1 doctor-recommended weight-loss program, helping millions of people develop sustainable, healthy habits for life. By connecting their “What to Eat” feature with Instacart, WeightWatchers users will be able to turn their good intentions into immediate action by adding the ingredients they need for their WeightWatchers recipes to their shopping list and Instacart cart, to get them delivered right to their door.

And with GE Appliances’ integration of Instacart into GE Appliances SmartHQ app, consumers’ custom recipe creations from Flavorly™ AI can now extend beyond the ingredients they have available in their kitchens. Flavorly lets users generate custom recipes with photos and instructions based on the ingredients, type of cuisine and dietary preferences. Instacart ordering and same-day delivery will also be available for the shoppable, seasonally inspired recipes on the LCD touchscreen of select GE Profile™, CAFÉ™ and Monogram™ wall ovens and slide-in ranges. Consumers will begin to see new features in the fall of 2024.

IDP will also unlock new features for developers of all sizes. We’re also excited to work with additional recipe/meal planning and health & wellness apps like Biocoach, DinnerTime, Eatlove, eMeals, Foodsmart, Innit, Intent, Jow, Jupiter, Maple, North Fork, Relish and Smart Commerce.

All of these experiences are amazing, but they get even better when they’re paired with our technology and unmatched network of retail and brand partners.

Now Live: Instacart Developer Platform Partner Applications

The first version of the Instacart Development Platform is live today and accepting partner applications at http://instacart.com/company/business/developers. And this is just the beginning. In the months ahead, we’ll work with our partners to power even more experiences and explore how we could help them integrate with the Instacart platform in new ways — including rich real-time product search, product availability, and retailer location finder.

We succeed when our partners succeed, and our business has always been about growing the pie for everyone. That’s what the IDP will do, and I’m excited to see how our partners use it.

Daniel Danker

Author

Daniel Danker is Chief Product Officer for Instacart, where he oversees the company’s product strategy, direction, and consumer experience. Prior to joining Instacart, Danker led the Uber Eats product team, where he was instrumental in defining the strategy and roadmap for Uber Eats across consumers, delivery people, and restaurants. Before leading Uber Eats, Daniel led Uber’s Driver product team, which focused on the millions of drivers on Uber's platform. Danker was also previously the Product Director for Video at Facebook, launching products like Facebook Live and Facebook Watch, in addition to Chief Product Officer of Shazam, where he sat on Shazam's executive board and led the expansion of Shazam's role in music.Danker graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a Bachelors degree in Mass Communications.