Among the new features Instacart has recently introduced to its platform is Smart Shop, which leverages generative AI and machine learning to create a more personalized grocery shopping experience.
With Smart Shop, Instacart analyzes customer habits and dietary preferences to find the most relevant products faster.
In addition, Instacart unveiled new AI-powered Health Tags, which provide detailed and transparent nutritional information across the catalog, and Inspiration Pages, curated destinations featuring expert-backed health recommendations and shoppable recipes.
The first Inspiration Page was developed in collaboration with the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and features evidence-based nutrition guidance and diabetes-friendly grocery and recipe recommendations.
Launched to coincide with National Nutrition Month, these offerings make it easier for consumers to discover relevant products based on their health and lifestyle preferences.
“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, Instacart’s chief product officer.
“By combining our new Smart Shop technology, Health Tags and Inspiration Pages, we’re not just improving online grocery shopping – we’re reimagining it, making it seamless to go from intention to action. 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.”
Smart Shop technology
Smart Shop technology applies behavior analysis and affinity modeling to analyze real-world shopping habits, identifying patterns in user preferences with high precision.
To further refine this understanding, large language models (LLMs) improve personalization by identifying the most valuable signals for predicting preferences to enhance accuracy.
For example, inferring a customer’s preference for low-carb products is complex because many everyday items are naturally low in carbohydrates, making it difficult to determine true intent.
Traditional machine learning models rely on large datasets and extensive feature engineering to differentiate between routine purchases and deliberate low-carb choices.
LLMs simplify this process by analyzing product categories and detecting intent-based patterns in user behavior. They pinpoint deliberate low-carb choices and filter out noise from irrelevant signals like purchases of naturally low-carb items.
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.
These interactions sharpen Smart Shop’s ability to predict user needs and refine recommendations. By combining structured insights with pre-trained AI, this approach drives precision and personalized grocery experiences.
Customizable Smart Shop preferences
To further tailor the experience, customers can modify their shopping preferences, selecting from 14 dietary preferences, including gluten free, high protein, high fiber, lactose free, low calorie, low carb, low sodium, low sugar, low fat, organic, pescatarian, preservative free, vegan and vegetarian.
Through the preferences, customers can share household details, like whether they’re also shopping for a baby, toddler or pet. All of these inputs enhance Smart Shop personalization, helping find items and aisles on Instacart that better align with each person’s dietary and household preferences.
New Health Tags
According to a recent Instacart customer survey, more than 70 percent of users have at least one dietary preference. To help them navigate grocery options with ease, Instacart developed an AI-driven Health Tag system, which scans product data at scale to extract key nutrition characteristics.
This multimodal AI platform leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to extract rich product attributes from text and images to enable rapid, high accuracy tagging of nutrition claims, ingredients and dietary labels.
Health Tags provide transparent easy-to-digest details on approximately half a million items across the more than 100,000 stores on the Instacart platform.
Instacart’s 30 Health Tags now include gluten free, grass fed, heart healthy, high fiber, high protein, keto, lactose free, minimally processed, pasture raised, preservative free, no artificial colors, no artificial flavors, non-GMO, vegetarian, vegan and wild caught.
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Inspiration pages
Instacart also is introducing Inspiration Pages, curated destinations within the Instacart experience that make expert nutrition advice and recommended recipes shoppable.
The first page – launched in collaboration with the ADA – simplifies shopping for people living with prediabetes, diabetes and obesity – while also supporting anyone looking to make healthier grocery choices. By making nutrition guidance easily accessible, Inspiration Pages help customers find foods that align with their health goals.
With nearly half of all American adults managing at least one preventable chronic disease linked to diet and lifestyle, access to reliable nutrition resources has never been more important.
Instacart plans to continue expanding Inspiration Pages, launching new shoppable experiences based on Smart Shop preferences like high fiber and high protein, and partnering with additional organizations to bring more expert-backed guidance onto the platform.