Food Bazaar, Harmon’s, Heritage Grocers Group, The Save Mart Companies, Stew Leonard’s, and Woodman’s are among grocers bringing Cart Assistant to help their customers plan meals, manage budgets, and manage dietary preferences
As AI changes the way people discover, plan, and shop for groceries, and as grocery and retail partners increasingly asked for AI capabilities they could deploy on their own channels, Instacart is bringing AI-powered shopping experiences across the grocery ecosystem. Today, we introduced Clementine, our new consumer AI shopping assistant across the Instacart Marketplace app. We're also extending that same underlying AI technology — the very capabilities powering Clementine — to grocers through Cart Assistant, our enterprise AI shopping assistant built for retailers' owned and operated websites and apps.
With Cart Assistant, grocers can offer customers a branded, agentic shopping experience that handles the time-consuming parts of grocery shopping, like finding deals, easily reordering favorites, and building a cart from a photo of a shopping list. Cart Assistant is fully customizable based on what our retail partners told us matters most. From the agent's name and tone of voice to loyalty program integration and recipe content, the experience feels entirely native to each grocer's brand.
And across the industry, grocers are moving fast: Food Bazaar, Heritage Grocers Group, and Woodman's are already live with Cart Assistant, with ALDI U.S., Harmon’s, The Save Mart Companies banner stores, and Stew Leonard’s to follow..
The Grocery Intelligence Behind Cart Assistant
Instacart has spent nearly 15 years developing a deep expertise in how people actually shop for groceries, supporting over 1.6 billion lifetime orders across more than 2,200 retail banners and nearly 100,000 stores. Cart Assistant, powered by Instacart intelligence, brings that grocery expertise to work analyzing each grocer's catalog and customer data, delivering a solution purpose-built for each retailer and their customers. It integrates quickly across owned ecommerce channels via Instacart's Storefront Pro platform, and gets smarter with every interaction. For retailers using multiple Instacart enterprise solutions, every customer touchpoint can deepen that foundational intelligence.
"Instacart has been an enablement partner to grocers through every major shift in this industry, and our approach to AI is no different," said Ryan Hamburger, Chief Commercial Officer at Instacart. "As we build leading AI capabilities on our marketplace, we're bringing that same technology to retailers' owned and operated channels in a way that's practical and easy to adopt. We're proud to partner with retailers who recognize that AI is a competitive advantage they can deploy to better support and engage their customers."
A Complete AI Toolkit, Designed for Grocers at Every Scale
Cart Assistant is one piece of a broader suite of enterprise AI Solutions we’ve built for grocers of all sizes. Additional solutions include agentic analytics, which turns retail data into actionable insights in seconds, and in-store intelligence capabilities that give retailers a real-time view of shelf inventory across their stores.
We’re also helping retailers on the Instacart Marketplace capture AI-driven demand through partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google, making grocers shoppable wherever customers are already using AI — on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or AI Mode in Google Search.
Retailer quotes in support of Cart Assistant:
"Instacart has been a trusted technology partner across both our stores and digital channels for years, and that depth of grocery knowledge is hard to find anywhere else,” said Vivek Kalpande, Chief Digital Officer at The Save Mart Companies. "We're looking forward to bringing Cart Assistant to our customers, backed by a partner that understands grocery as well as we do."
"AI is transforming how customers shop, and it's important for us to make sure our banners are at the forefront of that shift," said Adam Salgado, Chief Experience Officer at Heritage Grocers Group. "Cart Assistant has made it possible to deploy AI technology quickly and in a way that feels authentic and personalized to each of our brands. For us, that includes the ability for our Spanish-speaking customers to use this technology too, because a personalized experience means meeting people in the language they're most comfortable using."
"Sharing recipe ideas and cooking inspiration with our customers has always been a big part of who we are at Stew Leonard's," said Tammy Berentson, Chief Marketing Officer at Stew Leonard's. “We love that Cart Assistant takes that a step further by turning a recipe idea into a ready-to-shop cart in seconds for our customers. Instacart's understanding of our business is what drew us to explore Cart Assistant, and we're excited to see how our customers engage with it."
To learn more about Instacart's AI Solutions, visit instacart.com/enterprise-platform/ai-solutions.
