Research Summary. You’ve probably gotten your takeout delivered, but have you gotten your groceries delivered? Millions of North Americans turned to Instacart when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Here are some key statistics on Instacart:
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Instacart earned $1.8 billion in annual revenue in 2021.
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Instacart has an estimated 500,000 shoppers (people who pick up items from stores for customers.)
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Instacart has about 9.6 million active users.
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In 2019, Instacart was losing $25 million every month.
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In April 2020, Instacart earned $10 million in profit – the first profitable month the company had ever recorded.
For further analysis, we broke down the data in the following ways:
Trends | Employment | Users | Food Delivery
General Instacart Statistics
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Instacart sold $35 billion worth of groceries in 2020.
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Instacart has 600 retail partners.
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Instacart is valued at $39 billion as of March 2021.
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85% of U.S. households have access to Instacart as of 2020.
Instacart Trends and Projections
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Instacart’s sales increased by 229.7% from 2019 to 2020.
In 2020, the company saw $23.42 billion in sales, and in 2019 it saw $7.1 billion.
Instacart’s growth is expected to slow throughout 2021 when experts predict it will see an 11.3% growth rate that will result in an estimated $26.1 billion in sales. Although this is significantly lower than the 2020 growth rate, it lines up more closely with a normal growth rate for the market.
It’s predicted that Instacarts sales will reach $35 billion by 2023.
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From 2013 to 2021, Instacart’s annual revenue increased from $10 million to $1.8 billion.
Here is the year-by-year breakdown of the company’s annual revenue starting the year after it launched:
Year Revenue 2013 $10 million 2014 $75 million 2015 $120 million 2016 $185 million 2017 $300 million 2018 $525 million 2019 $735 million 2020 $1.5 billion 2021 $1.8 billion -
The number of Instacart users increased from 3.3 million to 9.6 million from 2017 to 2020.
This means the number of people buying groceries through Instacart nearly tripled in just a few years. The biggest jump came from 2019 to 2020, when total users increased from 5.5 million to 9.6 million.
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The number of Instacart shoppers in 2020 was more than seven times the number of shoppers in 2018.
In 2018, Instacart had 70,000 people picking up groceries for customers. In 2019, that number had nearly doubled, reaching 130,000. By the end of 2020, after the COVID-19 pandemic had given a huge boost to the business, the company had 500,000 shoppers.
(Shoppers refer to the people who get paid by Instacart to pull and deliver grocery items to paying customers.)
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Instacart increased the number of retail and grocery partners it had from 165 in 2017 to 600 in 2020.
These partners are the stores that customers can order from on Instacart. Here is the year-by-year breakdown of how these numbers have increased:
Year Number of Partners 2017 165 2018 210 2019 300 2020 600 -
Instacart’s valuation went up from $2 billion in 2016 to $39 billion in 2021.
In 2021, Instacart was valued at over 19 times the amount it was in 2016. From 2017 to 2018, the company’s value more than doubled, increasing from $3.4 billion to $7.6 billion, and it almost doubled again from 2018 to 2020, when it hit $13.7 billion.
Then from 2020 to 2021, Instacart’s value tripled, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic encouraging more people to buy their groceries online.
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In 2016, Instacart only served 25 cities; in 2020, it served 5,500 cities across North America.
The company saw the biggest jump in locations between 2016 and 2018 when it went from being available in 25 cities to 4,000. High demand due to the COVID-19 pandemic then gave Instacart the revenue and customer base it needed to expand its locations to 5,500 cities across the U.S. and Canada.
Instacart Statistics by Employment
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Instacart has 500,000 shoppers who are independent contractors.
These workers act as freelancers, and they shop and deliver orders for customers from a variety of Instacart partner stores.
The company also has about 10,000 Instacart employees (not independent contractors) who work for the company within a single store. These workers also shop and deliver items to customers, but they only do it for one store at a time, acting more like the store’s own delivery service rather than a third-party shopper-for-hire.
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Instacart hired 350,000 shoppers in 2020.
300,000 shoppers were hired between March and April 2020 as COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns took full effect and people were much more willing to pay for their groceries to be delivered.
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As of the end of 2020, about 2% of Instacart shoppers are employees of the company rather than independent contractors.
Most if not all of these employees are part-time employees, but they’re still employees, and they shop for and deliver groceries for Instacart customers at particular stores.
Instacart’s 500,000 independent contractors also shop for and deliver orders, but these workers usually do so from multiple different stores a day rather than representing Instacart at one particular store.
Instacart Statistics by Users
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48% of American adults used online ordering systems to get groceries during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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The number of seniors using Instacart increased by 9% from the first quarter to the fourth quarter of 2020.
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Customers placed 8% more grocery orders on weekdays in 2020 than they did in 2019.
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36% of Americans said “How to save money on groceries” is a food lesson they learned over the pandemic.
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29% of Americans said they learned “How to stock the pantry and/or refrigerator” during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instacart Statistics by Food Delivery Industry
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Instacart held 12% of the U.S. food delivery app market at the beginning of 2021.
This put Instacart in fourth place behind DoorDash, Uber Eats, and GrubHub as far as the largest share of the food delivery app market goes. Here’s how these three and a few others have compared over the past few years:
DoorDash Uber Eats GrubHub Instacart Postmates Shipt Other 2017 12% 39% 11% 5% 11% 1% 22% 2018 19% 31% 15% 6% 10% 1% 16% 2019 32% 20% 16% 5% 14% 2% 11% 2020 32% 18% 15% 12% 9% 3% 11% 2021 33% 21% 14% 12% 7% 3% 11% -
Food delivery app downloads in the U.S. increased by 3% from 2019 to 2020.
The number of food delivery apps downloads increased from 89 million downloads in 2019 to 91 million in 2020 (these numbers only count first-time downloads).
Here is the breakdown of how much each food and drink app sector grew from 2019 to 2020:
2019 Total Downloads 2020 Total Downloads Percent Change Food Delivery 89 million 91 million +3% Fast Food 69 million 81 million +21% Fast Casual 32 million 39 million +23% Grocery Store 12 million 19 million +56% Casual Dining 12 million 17 million +47% Cooking 15 million 26 million +9% -
Online grocery purchases account for 10% of the grocery industry.
The share of the grocery industry these online purchases held tripled from 2019 to 2020, growing from 3.4% to 10.2%.
By 2025, it’s estimated that grocery e-commerce sales will account for 21.5% of the grocery industry as a whole.
Instacart Statistics FAQ
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Instacart is worth $39 billion. This was its valuation as of March 2021, and it is 19 times higher than the company’s 2016 valuation.
Launched in 2012, Instacart was valued at $2 billion just four years later in 2016. It saw a significant jump in its value from 2017 to 2018 when it more than doubled in a year, going from $3.4 billion to $7.6 billion.
The company then saw steady growth in its value until it jumped significantly again in 2020, when its sales increased exponentially due to the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns. In 2019, Instacart made $7.1 billion in sales, and in 2020 it made $23.42 billion.
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Yes, Instacart makes a profit. However, it didn’t until April 2020. Before that, throughout 2019, Instacart was losing money (about $125 million a month). Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, driving millions of people to their services and giving Instacart $10 million in profit in April 2020.
Throughout the rest of 2020, Instacart saw $23.42 billion in sales, which was a 229.7% increase from 2019 and resulted in $1.5 billion in revenue.
As of 2020, Instacart has 9.6 million users (up from 5.5 million in 2019), and its sales are only expected to increase over the next few years, albeit at a slower rate. Experts predict that Instacart’s sales will grow by 11.3% throughout 2021 and that the company will see $35 billion in sales by 2023.
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How many Instacart shoppers are there?
There are about 500,000 Instacart shoppers. These shoppers are the independent contractors who go to stores to purchase items for customers and then deliver those items to customers’ homes.
In 2020, Instacart hired about 350,000 shoppers, 300,000 of which were brought on between March and April. This was a response to Instacart’s exponential growth fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns.
In addition to these shoppers, there are about 10,000 Instacart employees who perform many of the same functions as the independent contractors, but they work at one store at a time instead of multiple.
These employees act as a kind of delivery service for the store they work at, but they’re still paid by and work under the Instacart name, not the store.
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How many Instacart users are there?
There are 9.6 million Instacart users. This was the number as of 2020 after Instacart saw its total number of users (the people who order groceries or other items on Instacart) increase by 4.1 million from 2019 to 2020.
Instacart users are located all across the U.S. and Canada, as Instacart now serves 5,500 cities through its 600 partners (stores that people can order from on Instacart).
During the COVID-19 pandemic, 48% of Americans used online ordering systems to buy groceries, one of the biggest of which was Instacart. Seniors started using services like Instacart more as Instacart saw a 9% increase in orders from this demographic from quarter one of 2020 to quarter four.
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Does Instacart reimburse for gas?
No, Instacart doesn’t reimburse for gas. Since you’ll likely be an independent contractor and not an employee as an Instacart shopper, Instacart just pays you based on the number of tasks you complete instead of paying you an hourly rate and covering all of your work expenses like they would for an employee.
However, Instacart may adjust the pay you’ll receive for a job based on how long it will take you and how far you need to go, or they’ll at least calculate how much you earned on top of gas and mileage costs for you.
While this isn’t the same as reimbursing you for gas, it can help you get a more accurate understanding of what you’re actually taking home each week so you can plan accordingly.
Instacart shoppers should also note that as independent contractors, you should be able to write off a number of your gas and mileage expenses when you file your tax return. Just be sure to keep copious records of your expenses throughout the year to make sure you can file accurately.
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Can you write off mileage for Instacart?
Yes, you can write off mileage for Instacart. Because Instacart shoppers are considered independent contractors, they’re also considered self-employed, which means they can deduct many of their business expenses from their taxable business income.
This doesn’t mean that they’ll get reimbursed for these expenses, but it does mean that they may be able to pay a little less in taxes.
If you’re an Instacart shopper and you’d like to make these deductions, you’ll need to document your expenses to save as proof for your records to submit to the IRS.
So, keep a mileage log with dates, times, distances, and the purpose of your trips, keep your receipts and invoices, and don’t work some of your personal expenses in with your business ones: That’s tax fraud. It’s always a good idea to talk to an accountant about what you need to do to legally maximize these deductions as well.
Conclusion
Since its launch in 2012, Instacart had had a bumpy path, only clocking its first profitable month in April 2020, when it earned a profit of $10 million.
Leading up to 2020, American shoppers were slowly starting to make more and more of their grocery purchases online, but the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic expedited this process, driving millions of customers to Instacart. From 2019 to 2020, Instacart’s sales increased by 229.7%, and its annual revenue increased from $735 million to $1.5 billion.
To serve the 9.6 million customers it now had (up from 5.5 million in 2019), the company hired 350,000 shoppers, 300,000 of which it brought on between March and April 2020.
While Instacart’s wildfire-like growth has slowed some, the company is expected to continue to thrive with an 11.3% growth rate throughout 2021 and an estimated $35 billion in sales by 2023.
References
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Forbes. “Instacart Survived Covid Chaos – But Can It Keep Delivering After the Pandemic?” Accessed on April 14, 2022.
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Statista. “Instacart Availability in the United States and Canada in 2020.” Accessed on April 14, 2022.
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eMarketer. “Instacart Accounts for 1 in 5 U.S. Grocery Ecommerce Sales, But Its Share is Decreasing.” Accessed on April 14, 2022.
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Business of Apps. “Instacart Revenue and Usage Statistics (2022).” Accessed on April 14, 2022.
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Food and Wine. “Instacart Lays Off Unionized Employees, Continues Focus on Independent Contractors.” Accessed on April 14, 2022.
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CNN. “Instacart HIred 300,000 Workers in a Month. It Plans to HIre 250,000 More.” Accessed on April 14, 2022.
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Instacart. “Beyond the Cart: A Year of Essential Insights.” Accessed on April 14, 2022.
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Sensor Tower. “Top U.S. Food Delivery Apps Surpassed 90 Million Installs in 2020.” Accessed on April 14, 2022.
Author
Abby is a writer who is passionate about the power of story. Whether it’s communicating complicated topics in a clear way or helping readers connect with another person or place from the comfort of their couch. Abby attended Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she earned a degree in writing with concentrations in journalism and business.
