Derek Kravitz

Yeah, so Instacart bought a small AI company a few years ago called Eversight.

And as a result, they are far and away the most sophisticated tech company in retail.

And so many companies are investing in AI, but specifically Instacart uses AI in a way that supercharges or turbocharges their data collection and their use of data for individual shoppers.

And they're huge.

They've grown to now roughly 300 million orders on pace for 2025.

So we really just want to know how much AI is driving grocery store prices through a service like Instacart?

How can grocery retailers use this technology to set prices that you see in app or online?

So we recruited hundreds of volunteers from across the country to hop on video calls with us.

And we all shopped live, right?

We all shopped for the same exact items from the same exact grocery stores at the same exact time.

trying to control for as many variables as we could to understand how Instacart is using this tech, this AI, to inform their grocery prices.

What we found were, you know, 75% of the products we tested had algorithmically changed prices.

Everything from 7 cents on the low end all the way up to $2.56 on the high end.

And some of the products had really large price variances.

Skippy peanut butter had a 23% price variance between the low and the high.

And, you know, that adds up to real money over time when we extrapolate that out over the course of a year using

Instacart's own estimates for how much Americans spend on groceries in a given year.

That's the difference between $1,200 for a household of four.

You know, a lot of people liken it to like A-B testing.

And when I say that, I mean, you know, they're toggling one price, 5, 10, 15 cents more, and then another price, 5, 10, 15 cents less, and trying to figure out that perfect mix of price points that will compel you, the shopper, to buy those products.