Introducing Smart Shop: How Instacart’s AI is Personalizing Your Shopping Experience

We know grocery shopping isn’t just about restocking your pantry. It’s also core to fueling your life and nourishing the people you care about. With thousands of products to choose from, finding exactly what you need can be overwhelming. That’s why we’re using the power of advanced AI, including generative technology and machine learning models, to make shopping faster, easier, and more personal than ever.

Introducing Smart Shop: Grocery Shopping Built Around You

Today, we’re excited to announce Smart Shop, our AI-powered personalization foundation that's redefining your experience on Instacart. With a catalog of 17 million unique items and data from millions of grocery shopping journeys, we have unmatched insight into how people shop. Smart Shop leverages advanced machine learning to understand your shopping habits and identify patterns in your preferences. It then combines that understanding with generative AI to connect related products, enhancing discovery and personalization for a more tailored and intuitive shopping experience. Whether you're navigating dietary preferences or exploring healthier options, Smart Shop takes the guesswork out of grocery shopping by presenting items that match your unique lifestyle and goals. With every shop, Smart Shop dynamically adjusts based on your choices, continually learning and improving to refine its recommendations. The result? Less time spent searching for what you need and more time enjoying the moments that matter.

Your Preferences, Understood

Shopping for your dietary preferences shouldn’t feel like a scavenger hunt. That’s why Smart Shop is built with one goal in mind: to help you browse items that reflect your tastes, your lifestyle, and what matters to you. More than 70% of our customers have at least one dietary preference – whether you’re following a gluten-free lifestyle or have an aversion to shellfish – making grocery customization a necessity, not a luxury. That’s why Smart Shop is built to cater to your preferences, ensuring the items you’re shopping for actually match the way you live.

• Learning your preferences automatically: Smart Shop uses machine learning to recognize patterns in your shopping habits – like previous purchases and frequent searches – helping to better understand and support your likely dietary preferences. It then applies sophisticated generative AI to intelligently link related products, making it easier to discover new favorites and enjoy a highly personalized shopping experience. Identifying whether you prefer low-carb products, for example, isn’t as simple as it seems – many everyday items, like chicken breast, are naturally low in carbs, but we know that doesn’t necessarily mean you're shopping with low-carb intent. Traditional machine learning requires massive datasets to tell the difference, but large language models (LLMs) help by recognizing patterns in how you shop, filtering out noise, and identifying intentional low-carb choices. This means smarter, more accurate recommendations without relying on manual tagging – making shopping on Instacart feel even more intuitive and personalized. Smart Shop can even help recommend non-food items that fit your lifestyle, like diapers for your toddler and natural dog food for your pup.

• Real-time prompts for better accuracy: Throughout your shopping journey, you’ll see helpful prompts like, “Show more low-carb options?” With your input, these interactions – combined with Instacart’s proprietary shopping data, advanced ML models and LLM reasoning – continuously sharpen Smart Shop’s ability to predict your needs and refine recommendations, helping you discover new favorites while staying true to your lifestyle. 

• Easily customize your shopping experience: If you’d like to set your preferences manually, you can navigate to the Smart Shop preferences section within your settings in the Instacart experience. You can select from 14 common preferences, including low calorie, low sodium, lactose free, high fiber, high protein, preservative free, pescatarian, vegan, vegetarian, and more, which can help you better find what you’re looking for on Instacart.

• Tailored item carousels: Based on your Smart Shop preferences, Instacart leverages AI-optimized tagging and relevancy scoring to populate carousels on your favorite retailer’s digital storefront that match your choices. For example, if you've set gluten-free as a preference, you might see a ‘Gluten-free favorites’ carousel featuring products that align with your lifestyle.

Smarter Suggestions with Health Tags

Once your preferences are set, you can further enhance your grocery shop. Our Health Tags will help you find the right products that meet your preferences: 

• Health Tags, powered by AI: Health Tags incorporate an advanced, AI multimodal engine that processes rich product metadata alongside product images, using vision-language models (VLMs) to accurately label items by their unique dietary characteristics. With over 1.3 billion data points tagged, we’ve created 30 Health Tags, like high protein, low carb, preservative free, low sugar, organic and more, available across approximately half a million food and beverage products to help you filter for the products you want to shop. To maximize the reliability of our Health Tags, we’ve built and implemented human-in-the-loop systems to review the AI-enriched tags for accuracy. This process saves time and effort by cutting down on manual work while still ensuring a high standard of quality.  

• Dynamic search filters: Searching for something specific? Smart Shop makes it easy to filter products by Health Tags with just a few taps, helping give you precise results without extra scrolling. 

Explore More with Inspiration Pages

Shopping is about more than knowing the exact products you want; it’s also about inspiration! Today, we’ve also launched Inspiration Pages – personalized hubs showcasing products that match your dietary preferences while also offering creative ideas for your next meal. These pages bring everything together with tailored carousels categorized for easy browsing. Whether you’re searching for a new recipe or would like to browse all your lactose-free favorites in one spot, these pages will make shopping more intuitive and effortless. 

• Expert-backed recommendations: In collaboration with the American Diabetes Association® (ADA), we’ve launched our first Inspiration Page featuring diabetes friendly recipes and item recommendations, all in one convenient place.

• Personalized hubs for easy browsing: Launching over the next few weeks, we also plan to continue to expand dedicated Inspiration Pages, including new shoppable experiences for 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 present relevant products and recipes based on your preferences and health goals. 

A Grocery Game Changer

Smart Shop is more than a feature – it’s the foundation of personalization on Instacart. By leveraging generative AI, multimodal data extraction, and advanced preference modeling to understand your shopping habits and choices, Smart Shop transforms grocery shopping from a routine task into a curated experience, thoughtfully designed to meet the unique preferences of you and your family.

As we continue to enhance these tools, we’re not just focused on helping you check items off your grocery list - we’re also helping you discover meals, ingredients, and new products that align with your distinct tastes while inspiring new possibilities. Here’s to making every cart as unique as you are, paving the way for smarter, better shopping!

For more information on our Smart Shop technology and new Health features, read here.