Instacart Debuts AI-Powered Tools to Supercharge Healthy Food Shopping

Instacart has introduced Smart Shop, which leverages generative AI and machine learning to create a more personalized grocery shopping experience. The platform also has unveiled AI-powered Health Tags that provide detailed nutrition information across its catalog, as well as curated Inspiration Pages featuring expert-backed health recommendations and shoppable recipes.

The initial Inspiration Page was developed in collaboration with the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and is designed to simplify shopping for people with prediabetes, diabetes and obesity.

The Smart Shop technology, powered by Instacart’s catalog of 17 million items and its dataset of millions of grocery shopping journeys, applies behavior analysis and affinity modeling to analyze real-world shopping habits and identify user preference patterns with a high degree of precision.

For example, inferring whether a customer prefers low-carb products is complex because many everyday items are naturally low in carbohydrates, which makes it difficult to determine true intent. Traditional machine learning models rely on large datasets to differentiate between routine purchases and deliberate low-carb choices. Items like almond flour or cauliflower rice strongly indicate low-carb preferences, while staples like chicken breast, though low in carbs, are less indicative of the consumer’s intent.

The LLMs (large language models) used by Smart Shop, however, can pinpoint deliberate low-carb choices and filter out irrelevant signals, eliminating the need for exhaustive tagging and manual feature engineering. 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 adapting to changing behaviors over time.

“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 in a statement. “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.”

Adding Dietary Preference Filters to the Shopping Experience

Customers can tailor their Smart Shop experience by selecting from 14 dietary preferences, such as gluten-free, high protein, lactose-free, pescatarian, vegan and vegetarian. They also can adjust Smart Shop preferences to share household details, such as whether they’re also shopping for a baby, toddler or pet.

The AI-driven Health Tag system scans product data at scale to extract key nutrition characteristics, using vision-language models (VLMs) to collate product attributes from text and images. Instacart has tagged more than 1.3 billion data points, allowing Health Tags to provide details on approximately 500,000 items across the more than 100,000 stores on the Instacart platform. The 30 Health Tags now include gluten-free, grass fed, heart healthy, pasture raised, minimally processed and wild caught.

The Instacart Inspiration Pages kick off with the ADA collaboration, making use of the organization’s Diabetes Plate, a method to help people with diabetes balance vegetables, lean protein and quality carbohydrates. Instacart and the ADA also have collaborated to build a turnkey nutrition program for healthcare partners, using Instacart Health Fresh Funds customized by the ADA to cover foods informed by their Standards of Care in Diabetes. 

Instacart plans to continue introducing Inspiration Pages and launching new shoppable experiences based on Smart Shop preferences such as high fiber and high protein, as well as partnering with additional organizations to take advantage of expert guidance.