25 minute read
ALL’S WELLNESS
from PG_1122
by ensembleiq
Snacks Versus Meals
esearch from the International Food Information Council shows a significant uptick in daily snacking among Americans, from roughly 59% in 2020 and 2021 to 73% in 2022. Compared with meals, snacking contributes more energy than breakfast and slightly less than lunch as a percent of daily calories. Although snacking has increased at all times of the day, late afternoon between 3:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m. is the most common time to have at least one snack.
What Foods Do Snackers Choose?
Morning snackers are more likely to choose fruit or dairy — such as cheese, yogurt or smoothies — while evening snackers often choose savory, salty snacks, followed by chocolate, candy, cookies, cake and ice cream. Selection of nuts and seeds as snacks increased sharply, up double digits. Sweets are still the most commonly consumed snacks in the United States, representing more than one-third of snack energy, while 17% of snack energy comes from chips and crackers. Consumers often compensate for snack energy by increasing energy expenditure through activity or reducing calorie intake throughout the day.
What Benefits Do Snackers Seek?
Snackers report seeking snacks that will boost energy and reduce fatigue; aid weight loss and boost metabolism; manage digestive and gut health; improve heart health; decrease inflammation and manage glucose response; improve sleep quality and immune function; maximize muscle strength, bone health and exercise endurance; improve memory, cognition and mental focus; and prevent cancer.
Snacking to Fill Gaps
Retailers should consider various opportunities to measurably improve snack quality and fill significant energy, variety and nutrient gaps. Research shows that more than half of dietary nut and seed consumption and 43% of whole fruit consumption come from snacks, while just 18% of whole grain intake and only 8% of vegetable intake come from snacks. Perhaps the largest opportunity lies with increasing total dietary fiber intake; currently, just 5% of Americans get the recommended amount of dietary fiber they need each day.
Guide Shoppers Toward Personalized Snacks
17.8% 23.5% 22.6%
BREAKFAST LUNCH DINNER SNACKS
Comparison of Meal Occasion Percent Daily Calories Source: International Food Information Council
Retailers should Why Do Snackers Snack?
consider various Stress has a strong connection to opportunities to measurably improve snack quality and snacking habits: 29% of those who have been “very stressed” in the past six months snack three or more times a day, compared with just fill significant 10% of those who’ve been “someenergy, variety what stressed.” Other reasons cited and nutrient gaps. for snacking include being hungry or thirsty; a desire for a treat; the need for energy; the convenient, habit-forming nature of snacking; a specific desire for a salty or sweet taste; or simply to counteract boredom. While the act of snacking has become a ubiquitous part of our food culture, it can be hard for consumers to choose healthy snacks that also fit their budgets, schedules and flavor preferences. Retail dietitians can help shoppers rethink snack choices. For example, point exercise enthusiasts to pre-workout fuel or post-workout recovery to help repair muscle and replenish stored energy. Present busy parents of schoolage children with healthy, portable snacks the whole family will eat. Guide individuals working from home to stock up on mini (100- to 300-calorie) meals they can eat between back-to-back Zoom calls. No matter what consumers want in a snack, grocery retailers have better-for-you, personalized snacking solutions to offer.
Karen Buch, RDN, LDN, is a registered dietitian/ nutritionist who specializes in retail nutrition marketing and communications. One of the first supermarket dietitians, she is now founder and principal consultant at Nutrition Connections LLC, providing consulting services nationwide. You can connect with her on Twitter.
To understand just how much food and the grocery industry mean to Instacart CEO Fidji Simo, it helps to visit her kitchen in Carmel-by-the-Sea.
On a gloriously sunny California afternoon, the French-born Simo, CEO of the 10-yearold e-commerce startup that transformed the grocery industry, is busy juggling meetings, interviews with journalists and baking. Or rather, helping her husband, Remy, test the baked goods.
Sitting down to chat in the garden, Simo looks at Remy, who has emerged from the kitchen with a tray of sweets that smell of the boulangeries and patisseries in Europe. It’s a gesture that Simo traces to her roots growing up in a family of fishmongers in southeastern France.
Simo’s love of food, however, was not to be surpassed by another passion: technology. “I was also always fascinated by technology; that’s why I studied business,” she explains.
Ready for the ‘Groceryssance’
Instacart CEO Fidji Simo wants to help grocers build the store of the future. By Gina Acosta
After finishing business school, Simo started her career in Silicon Valley at eBay and “really fell in love with what technology could enable.” She later moved to Facebook, where she spent 10 years developing platforms, led the mobile monetization strategy and “made video a critical part of the Facebook experience.” Then, for her last two years at the company, she “was leading the flagship Facebook app, which was the privilege of a lifetime.”
Now Simo, who was named CEO of Instacart in August 2021, is tasked with leading the next phase of growth for an estimated $13 billion company that’s preparing to possibly go public at a turbulent time not just for the stock market, but also for the grocery industry and the economy.
The question on everyone’s mind: Does Simo’s plan to grow Instacart involve it becoming a retailer? She has thoughts on the matter — but more on that later.
For now, Simo says that she’s focused on fine-tuning Instacart’s
—Fidji Simo, CEO, Instacart
business model to be more of a grocery technology company than a grocery delivery/pickup company, a partner to grocers that understands the challenges they’re facing and helps them thrive, no matter the obstacle.
Instacart's new Out of Stock Insights helps retailers provide automatic real-time alerts to associates when items are running low or out of stock. For retailers, this can result in fewer missed sales opportunities; for customers, it increases the chances they can find exactly what they want.
10 Years of Instacart
It’s hard to believe that Instacart has already been around for a decade.
For many retailers, Instacart was the first e-commerce lifeline at a time when many in the grocery industry weren’t even familiar with terms such as “pickers,” “fulfillment centers” or “substitutions.” The pandemic supercharged growth at the San Francisco-based company, which saw order volumes surge more than 300% in early 2020, and then drove record volume and revenue in 2021, helping it become the dominant grocery technology company in the United States. Today, Instacart partners with more than 900 national, regional and local retail brands to facilitate online shopping, delivery and pickup services from more than 75,000 stores across 13,000-plus cities in North America. But digital grocery sales have moderated due to shoppers returning to physical stores, and price sensitivity around inflation; in October, the monthly Brick Meets Click/Mercatus Grocery Shopping Survey showed that total U.S. online grocery sales in September declined 3% year over year to $7.8 billion, although third-quarter online grocery sales for 2022 gained nearly 4% to $24.1 billion compared with 2021. Meanwhile, grocery e-commerce competitors have bubbled up and grocers have started launching their own digital solutions as they look to keep more of the power of consumer data to themselves.
According to Simo, the best way to navigate “rough waters,” whether it’s inflation, competition or finicky consumer behavior, is by aligning with a mission and getting your employees really motivated for the vision.
“The main thing I wanted to do to mark our anniversary was get the company together for a day and use that time to connect with the team on
FoodStorm's order management system aims to help retailers manage orders for items such as baked goods, hot items and deli sandwiches while customers are shopping.
the vision for the next 10 years,” she says. “So we really laid out what the next 10 years could look like, the real at-scale problems that we could solve for the industry. People reacted very well and were super-excited. When you’re very clear on where you’re going, you can lead the team through it, and so that’s something I always double down on.”
Instacart filed a confidential draft registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission in May. Simo won’t comment on the timing for an IPO, but she says that the company is busy adding solutions for retailers that focus on the three pillars of the business: the Instacart App, the Instacart Platform and the advertising arm.
“In all three of these areas, we’re developing a lot of innovation that can drive our growth,” she notes. “On the Instacart App side, we are continuing to increase the number of retailers that we work with. We now have retailers that represent 80% of the U.S. grocery market. We’re also continuing to expand our use cases — not just grocery, but also convenience, pickup, ready meals and catering. We’re driving online adoption through partnerships and marketing as we go from about 10% online penetration today to an estimated 20% to 35% of sales within the next five years. And we’re doing a lot to make the grocery experience less about pure utility and more about inspiration.”
This year, Instacart launched its Connected Stores suite, which features six new Instacart Platform offerings: the Caper smart cart, Scan & Pay, Lists, Carrot Tags, FoodStorm Department Orders, and Out of Stock Insights — modular technologies that help retailers connect online and in-store experiences. Simo says that the company launched the suite based on feedback from grocers that are having tech challenges on their own properties.
“We’re basically taking all the innovations that we’re developing for our marketplace, and we’re building them in a way so that we can put them in the hands of retailers,” she continues. “A lot of technology partners are addressing just one particular piece of the grocer’s tech problem. But we look at the entire ecosystem, and what grocers are telling us is that they like that we’ve already tested our technologies with the consumer. So we know what works, because it’s already been proven on our marketplace. That’s something that other technology partners cannot provide.”
The other advantage to the Connected Stores suite, Simo points out, is that grocers’ technology teams don’t have to piece together various disparate solutions. Rather, Instacart’s offering “is a set of technologies that are modular, so if you have your own thing in some areas, and you just want a piece of our platform to enhance your existing experience, you can have that in a modular way,” she explains. “But if you want a whole thing brought together, you can also get that.”
Eversight, which Instacart acquired in September, aims to help brands and retailers be more agile and consumer-centric with their pricing and promotions strategies. The AI-powered platform enables CPG brands and retailers to continuously test customized pricing and promotions directly with their individual customers.
Instacart's newly redesigned Caper Carts are equipped with scales, sensors, touchscreens and computer vision that powers scanless technology, so that customers can navigate the store and check themselves out without manually scanning items. The new model of the Caper Cart is slimmer and lighter than the previous version, with 65% more capacity.
Growing the Pie
In the past few months, Simo’s team has been on an acquisition spree as it looks to become a one-stop grocery technology shop for grocers.
In early September, Instacart acquired Ithaca, N.Y.-based Rosie, a premier e-commerce platform for local and independent retailers and wholesalers. Rosie, founded in 2013, offers independent grocers branded e-commerce websites and mobile app capabilities that power order flow, fulfillment and customer insights. Its product features include
SUPPLIER PERSPECTIVES PET SPECIALTY
Winning in E-Commerce: Top Tips to Make the Sale with Pet Owners
E-commerce – it’s not so much a trend as it is a new way of life for an increasing number of pet owners. The growth of e-commerce has been steadily gaining momentum, in particular over the last two years. As a result, there has been a shift toward behaviors that reduce the number of trips to a brick and mortar store. The pet care industry is moving faster than ever to meet pet owners’ needs in this evolving landscape. Pet owners who shop both online and in brick and mortar stores spend 50% more than pet owners who only shop in brick and mortar stores.* The growth of this channel paired with the growth of the pet category presents a big opportunity for brick and mortar retailers with an online presence. However, many shoppers are not choosing their store-based retailer for their e-commerce needs. “Driving awareness of your online pet solutions is important in navigating this competitive space,” said Joe Toscano, VP of Sales at Nestlé Purina. “Fortunately, there are some simple yet effective ways to meet your pet shoppers’ needs and promote customer loyalty.” Consider the following tips when planning your e-commerce strategy: • Meet pet owners when and where they choose to shop. Offering a variety of fulfillment options is key.
An effective e-commerce strategy should have an omni-channel fulfillment model that includes ship to home, BOPIS (buy online, pick up instore) and curbside pickup.
*Source: Nielsen Homescan Panel Custom Crosstab 52wks ending 8/13/2022 • Promote your platform. Store-based retailers have the unique opportunity to meet shoppers when and where they choose to shop. Share with them – both in-store and in aisle – that you have an online platform.
Because shoppers are moving online, it’s important to let them know you can meet their needs allowing them to stay with your franchise and increasing their loyalty to you as an omni-channel retailer. • Prioritize top selling products and brands. Think about your online platform as a mirror of in-aisle selection. Position your best-selling brands prominently on your pet landing pages, and feature engaging brand content, such as product photos, video and ratings and reviews.
Add large sizes or bulky items online for shoppers to fulfill when there isn’t enough shelf space in store. • Make it easy. Shoppers report that using a site once motivates them to go back and shop there again. Offering autoship or auto replenishment will not only allow shoppers to save time and money, but it will also increase repeat buyers. In fact, a Purina study found that more than two-thirds of pet buyers who use subscription for pet say they are very likely to continue.
Simplify the online checkout process and offer free shipping. E-commerce has changed the way shoppers buy their pet food and supplies. As the pet care category leader, Purina offers retail partners customized strategies to capture the valuable pet shopper’s sale. If you have questions or need assistance, reach out to your Purina sales rep.
Purina trademarks are owned by Société des Produits Nestlé S.A. Any other marks are property of their respective owners.
shoppable weekly ads, store loyalty and rewards program integrations, third-party fulfillment logistics integrations, and payment processing, all developed for local and independent grocers. With this acquisition, Instacart has debuted new e-commerce solutions built specifically for local and independent retailers that complement the company’s existing Instacart Platform offerings.
In May, Rosie helped Dash’s Market, a family-owned grocery chain with four locations in and around Buffalo, N.Y., launch Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) online payments. Dash’s Market was Rosie’s second independent retailer partner to go live accepting SNAP payments online, just weeks after Davis Food & Drug, in Utah, launched such a program.
The Rosie deal marked Instacart’s fourth acquisition in the past year. Instacart also acquired Palo Alto, Calif.-based Eversight, an artificial intelligence-powered pricing and promotions platform for CPG companies, in August. Through Eversight’s experimentation-based platform, CPG brands and retailers can continuously test customized pricing and promotions directly with their individual customers, at scale. This automates processes that have traditionally been highly manual and time-consuming, and lets brands and retailers engage in shopper-centric optimization.
Eversight’s CPG offerings will be part of the Instacart Ads product and technology suite, which provides CPG brand partners with measurable advertising opportunities and insights capabilities. For retailers, Eversight’s retail technology will be part of the Instacart Platform, a suite of enterprise-grade solutions that enhances and digitizes grocery retail to create an omnichannel experience for customers.
“The idea with these two acquisitions is really to take companies that have developed a strong expertise in one part of the market — Eversight in pricing, Rosie with independent grocers — and connect them with our ecosystem so we can give them scale,” Simo said. “In the case of Eversight, we’re really excited about the fact that it will result in a win-win for all partners by making the experience more affordable for consumers while also helping retailers and CPGs find their pricing sweet spot to optimize margins, which is going to be really important during this time.”
Last year, Instacart acquired smart cart maker Caper AI for $35 million and catering software firm FoodStorm; both companies are based in New York. In September, Instacart debuted a new version of Caper’s smart cart that comes equipped with scales, sensors, touchscreens and computer vision technology. The screen helps shoppers navigate the store, and unlike self-checkout terminals and other smart carts, the proprietary scanless technology means that shoppers don’t have to manually scan items. They can just drop them in the cart, bag groceries as they go, and check out right from the cart.
According to the company, the new Caper Cart is slimmer and lighter, holds 65% more than the previous version, and will be rolling through the aisles of retailers such as Keasbey, N.J.-based Wakefern Food Corp. in the coming months. It’s the only smart cart on the market to offer stacked charging, which means that grocers don’t have to charge carts individually or swap out batteries.
“In-store tech is a big opportunity for us,” Simo notes. “FoodStorm has kiosks where customers can do the ordering inside the store for catering, but they can also order online, and the Caper carts reduce lines at checkout and make store operations more efficient. If you have smart carts inside the store with personalization on the screen of the cart, it enhances the store experience dramatically.”
Over the past two years, Instacart has pioneered the EBT SNAP retailer onboarding process, which has enabled EBT SNAP payments nationwide with 70-plus retailers spanning more than 8,000 stores across the country.
Fighting Inflation
In September, the consumer price index increased 0.4% for the month, more than the 0.3% Dow Jones estimate, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On a 12-month basis, so-called inflation was up 8.2%, off its peak of around 9% in June, but still hovering near the highest levels since the early 1980s. With inflation persisting at a 40-year high, Simo says that she’s working to help grocers overcome the inflationary challenges affecting consumer behavior. “Right now, a big thing that we’re focused on is making the service more affordable,” she observes. “One of the things that we’re doing is making deals and discounts more accessible to people, which is why we created the Deals Tab. We can onboard value retailers that are on the more affordable end; that’s why we created a dollar hub. Then, when it comes to our membership, we want to continue providing more value, so with Instacart+, we relaunched it and we added the ability to have what we call family accounts.” Another inflation-fighting focus for Simo has been expanding SNAP. Over the past two years, Instacart has pioneered the EBT (electronic benefit transfer) SNAP retailer onboarding process, which has enabled EBT SNAP payments nation-
—Fidji Simo, CEO, Instacart
wide with more than 70 retailers and banners spanning more than 8,000 stores across 49 states and Washington, D.C. Today, the company has a goal of expanding EBT SNAP payment access to all Instacart grocery partners by 2030.
Simo says that Instacart customers three years ago tended to be much more affluent than the average U.S. population, “whereas right now, if you look at our split of consumers, we actually map very closely to the U.S. population in terms of income, which to me is incredibly important.” It’s a metric that she tracks very closely because she wants to make sure that online grocery is something that’s accessible for all.
Instacart’s SNAP efforts are part of its new health initiative that aims to increase nutrition security, make health choices simpler for consumers and expand the role that food plays in improving health outcomes. The initiative launched in coordination with the White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health in September.
“America’s health problem is actually a food problem,” Simo explains. “That’s why we launched Instacart Health, because we think health starts with good nutrition. And that’s why we’ve developed technologies for providers, nutritionists and dietitians to prescribe food in the same way as they would prescribe medicine.”
In terms of grocery e-commerce consumer trends, Simo says she’s “seeing people just want a lot of different things and have different needs, even across the same week. We are continuing to seize the need for convenience. Our convenience business is a segment of consumers who on occasion are ready to pay more to have their deliveries delivered faster, and it’s part of the business we’re continuing to see expand.”
She notes that people “always ask her whether quick commerce is dead,” now that so many entrants and innovators in that space seem to be foundering, but the reality is a bit more complicated than that.
“Quick commerce as a single use case is not sustainable on its own, but what we want to offer is all the possible options priced the right way,” Simo says. “So, yes, if you want to pay more for faster delivery, by all means. Sometimes we need something urgently, but there’s going to be other times where you’re just ordering your weekly shop, and it’s totally fine if it arrives within an hour.”
Grocers are telling Simo that options are what they want, because they want to capture all of these opportunities.
Pipeline for the Future
Earlier this fall, the city of San Diego revealed that Instacart had agreed to pay a $45 million settlement to resolve claims that the company misclassified more than 300,000 of its delivery workers, which Instacart calls “shoppers,” as independent contractors over a period of five years. Instacart has denied any wrongdoing and continues to maintain that it has at all times correctly classified its delivery workers. According to Simo, however, the company has been listening to its workers and making some changes.
“When I first got into the job, I spent a number of months really listening to what the shoppers needed,” she notes. “We addressed the biggest pain points. Ratings were generating a ton of anxiety, as they were worried that their ratings would impact their access to work. We’ve
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been able to make progress on that. We’ve also changed the rules for when a customer is able to change their tip after delivery. That’s a way for shoppers to have more of a guarantee that when they get a tip, it sticks.”
The company has also introduced various new benefits and perks for its community of more than 600,000 shoppers this year.
In October, Instacart launched peak earning days, a feature providing shoppers with information about certain days that will offer higher earnings opportunities in specific areas, so they can plan for the week ahead. Earlier, in July, the company introduced Cart Star, a new rewards program for shoppers. Every qualifying shopper in the Cart Star program will receive tailored rewards and offerings through third-party partners, as well as directly within the Instacart Platform. Other features that Instacart has added for shoppers this year include new shopper app features and several upgrades to the customer tipping process.
As for senior leadership at Instacart, Simo says that she’s thrilled about her newly enhanced executive ranks.
“I just have a really incredible management team at this point, and am so very, very excited about that,” she enthuses. “We’ve added roughly 20 VPs in the last year, and we’ve really bolstered the ranks even under that C-suite level. We feel like we’re really well positioned to tackle our bolder vision. I think the most important thing is showing your employees not only that you care, but also that you’re going every step of the way to do the right thing by them.”
When she thinks about the future of grocery, however, Simo admits that there’s still a lot of work to do.
Her advice for grocers trying to stay ahead of what’s next is the same counsel she follows at her own company: Have a portfolio and start planting seeds for things that you think your customers are going to need in the future.
“The way we prioritize innovation is ... we listen to our customers, we listen to our retail partners and we prioritize accordingly,” she observes. “Even on something like advertising, for example. We could see the trend of retail media becoming big. But if you are a grocer, setting up an entire retail media organization on your own is pretty hard. So, if we can take everything we’ve learned about advertising on Instacart and put that in the hands of retailers, that’s pretty powerful. A lot of what we do is we start testing things on our marketplace and we then bring that to retailers.”
The major growth drivers for Instacart, according to Simo, include launching new partner services, whether it’s in-store tech, convenience, alcohol, pickup, advertising or retail media. The one thing that won’t be driving growth, though, is becoming a retailer.
“We are not planning on becoming a retailer; in fact, our strategy is the exact opposite,” Simo says. “We want to empower retailers with the technologies that we build. We do not want to compete with them. If you look at all of our announcements in the last year, they are all about empowering grocers and taking our secret sauce and making it available to grocers on their own sites, inside their own stores, and really enabling them to compete better in that world.”
—Fidji Simo, CEO, Instacart
Instacart's acquisition of Rosie looks to give more retailers, especially independents, access to tools and technologies that can lead to growth in their businesses and deeper engagement with their customers — all while retaining their unique store experience and brand identity.
