Skip to main content

Instacart’s grocery ‘smart cart’ shows how it’s about more than just deliveries

In the middle of a modern grocery store, with smooth concrete flooring, white oak shelving and white tiled walls, there’s a beige and thick-bodied plastic shopping cart. The cart has a big orange and green carrot logo printed on the side, and a tablet computer affixed to the top where a child would normally sit, as well as a digital payment terminal.
The Caper Cart has sensors that can detect what you put in it, plus a touch screen and built-in payment system for self-checkout. | Image: Instacart

Instacart gig workers have a smartphone app with scanning tools at their disposal to fulfill delivery orders — but what if regular shoppers could also use them? The grocery delivery service plans to get regular everyday shoppers into “Connected Stores,” where they’d use a rolling smart cart with built-in support for lists, order deli meats or baked goods, finding items, and self-checkout.

The star of the show is Instacart’s upgraded “Caper Cart,” a smart cart that can detect what items in your list are placed in — based on computer vision and weight — and checks them off in your app. It’s got a big touchscreen that syncs your grocery list from your app and an attached payment terminal so you can self-checkout without waiting to use a terminal. The previous versions are in operation at select Kroger stores, but those were made before Instacart acquired Caper AI a year ago.

 Image: Instacart
Multiple sensors and cameras detect products as you slowly lower them into the cart.

The new cart is slimmer, lighter, and can hold 65 percent more products in them, according to Instacart. The company claims it’s the only smart cart that can recharge its batteries by stacking carts instead of needing to swap out batteries. They also accept over-the-air software updates. But if you can’t get one of these carts, you can also use Scan & Pay in the app to check yourself out.

On the surface, this sort of goes against Instacart’s delivery service goal: to remove the inconvenience of needing to go to the grocery store yourself. But as the pandemic wanes, demand for online delivery services is dropping and hurting the bottom lines of companies like Instacart, Uber, and DoorDash.

But people like their ability to make lists, go to the store, and have stuff ready and waiting for them while also having the flexibility to call an audible and grab a few extra, unplanned items. Large grocery store chains are spending the money needed to add connected shopping and self-checkout via app, while Amazon’s cashier-less tech is becoming more available — all of which is something smaller grocers don’t have the resources to match.

That’s what Instacart has been working on: building a white label smart shopping ecosystem that it claims can give any store a digital storefront or affix an existing one to work with the Instacart app. “Today, they have traditional curbside and same-day delivery services,” e-commerce expert Kassi Socha begins to tell us what’s motivating Instacart. “When I’m at the grocery store, and I see the Instacart logo that helps me do a seamless checkout, similar to the Amazon Go experience, I might try it and adopt that new behavior because I know in some way, shape, or form Instacart is gonna save me time.”

It’s a sentiment that falls in line with US consumer shopping plans for this holiday: 38 percent of them plan to use a combination of online orders for in-store pickup, use mobile payments, use online lists, and do curbside pickup, all alongside a lighter but strong demand for same-day deliveries, according to Gartner Consumer Insights.

Socha tells The Verge that retailers big and small are looking for a ready-to-go suite of software that Instacart has to get their services up and running quickly to “compete with Amazon and Walmarts of the world at the same speed.” Instacart is currently working with over 900 retailers across 75,000 stores in North America, according to Socha.

 Image: Instacart
You scan the Caper Cart’s QR code in the Instacart app and it syncs your shopping lists. You can then pay right on the cart.

Instacart’s software suite is the core component of its Connected Stores, taking what it has learned from partnering with grocery stores like Publix and Wegmans and expanding it to smartify any grocery store. It takes all the company’s fulfillment, insights, and even advertising tools to create a vertical solution that integrates stores’ digital storefront with Instacart — something it claims will save the store money compared to a complete overhaul. Store operations will also get better stock insights and save time by ordering things that are projected to go out of stock.

For shoppers, the system isn’t quite as fast as just picking something up and walking out like the systems operating at certain Whole Foods and Amazon Go stores. You will, however, be able to do things like order deli meat, baked goods, and fresh food within the same interface. And on the grocery store’s end, an updated Instacart FoodStorm ordering system combines kiosk / ticket orders and online ones in the same place.

 GIF by Instacart
Tap a button in the app, and it can set off a beacon light on the special price tags to guide you to it.

And if you’re having trouble finding something, the company has special e-ink price tags that can flash a light, drawing your eye to the correct spot in an aisle. They’re called Carrot Tags, and often they’ll display a QR code, so you can scan it and see even more info on the product. The tag can also display other useful info on the fly, like if the product is gluten-free, kosher, organic, etc. It can even tell you if an item is EBT or SNAP eligible.

Bristol Farms in Irvine, California, will be the first of the “Connected Stores” to be fully outfitted with all of Instacart’s new technology. You will also be able to go to a Wakefern Food Corp. store to try out the Caper Carts as well. It’ll all go live “in the coming months.” Instacart’s partnership with Walmart for same-day grocery delivery was one attempt at challenging Amazon, but that partnership has ended, and now it’s seemingly prepared to try again. But Amazon may fight back as it builds tools like palm-reading biometric payment systems that’ll be available to non-Amazon companies.



Source: The Verge

Popular posts from this blog

The hidden cost of food delivery

Noah Lichtenstein Contributor Share on Twitter Noah Lichtenstein is the founder and managing partner of Crossover , a diversified private technology fund backed by institutional investors, technology execs and professional athletes and entertainers. More posts by this contributor What Studying Students Teaches Us About Great Apps I’ll admit it: When it comes to food, I’m lazy. There are dozens of great dining options within a few blocks of my home, yet I still end up ordering food through delivery apps four or five times per week. With the growing coronavirus pandemic closing restaurants and consumers self-isolating, it is likely we will see a spike in food delivery much like the 20% jump China reported during the peak of its crisis. With the food delivery sector rocketing toward a projected $365 billion by the end of the decade, I’m clearly not the only one turning to delivery apps even before the pandemic hit. Thanks to technology (and VC funding) we can get a ri

Cyber Monday Canada: Last-minute deals for everyone on your list

Best Cyber Monday Canada deals: Smart Home Audio Phones, Tablets & Accessories Wearables Laptops & PC Components Amazon products Gaming Televisions Cameras Lifestyle & Kitchen Toys & Kids Cyber Monday Canada is here, and retailers are rolling out the red carpet for customers who want to shop for everything from tech to kitchenware to games and everything in between. Unlike years past, Cyber Monday Canada deals look a bit different than normal. Instead of retailers trying to pack their stores with as many shoppers as possible, we're seeing tons of online deals that you can take advantage of from the comfort of your home. We've rounded up our favorites below, so feel free to browse through the best of what Canada Cyber Monday has to offer! This list is being updated with new Cyber Monday deals all the time, so check back often. Spotlight deals It's a Switch Nintendo Switch Fortnite Edition bundle $399.95 at Amazon It's a Switch.

Slack’s new integration deal with AWS could also be about tweaking Microsoft

Slack and Amazon announced a big integration late yesterday afternoon. As part of the deal, Slack will use Amazon Chime for its call feature, while reiterating its commitment to use AWS as its preferred cloud provider to run its infrastructure. At the same time, AWS has agreed to use Slack for internal communications. Make no mistake, this is a big deal as the SaaS communications tool increases its ties with AWS, but this agreement could also be about slighting Microsoft and its rival Teams product by making a deal with a cloud rival. In the past Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield has had choice words for Microsoft saying the Redmond technology giant sees his company as an “existential threat.” Whether that’s true or not — Teams is but one piece of a huge technology company — it’s impossible not to look at the deal in this context. Aligning more deeply with AWS sends a message to Microsoft, whose Azure infrastructure services compete with AWS. Butterfield didn’t say that of course

iPhone 13 Pro vs. iPhone 15 Pro Buyer's Guide: 50+ Differences Compared

The iPhone 15 Pro brings over 50 new features and improvements to Apple's high-end smartphones compared to the iPhone 13 Pro, which was released two years prior. This buyer's guide breaks down every major difference you should be aware of between the two generations and helps you to decide whether it's worth upgrading. The ‌iPhone 13‌ Pro debuted in 2021, introducing a brighter display with ProMotion technology for refresh rates up to 120Hz, the A15 Bionic chip, a telephoto camera with 3x optical zoom, Macro photography and photographic styles, Cinematic mode for recording videos with shallow depth of field, ProRes video recording, a 1TB storage option, and five hours of additional battery life. The ‌iPhone 13‌ Pro was discontinued upon the announcement of the iPhone 14 Pro in 2022, but it is still possible to get hold of it second-hand. Our guide helps to answer the question of how to decide which of these two iPhone models is best for you and serves as a way to c