Instacart Expands Ordering Options with Ready Meals

On January 13, Instacart launched Ready Meals.  As the company’s press release states, online shoppers can get “fresh, healthy and cost-effective alternatives to restaurant takeout from customers’ favorite grocers. With Ready Meals, consumers nationwide can now take a break from cooking and instead get fresh, ready-made meals delivered from the store to their door in as fast as 30 minutes.”

Customers can now shop hundreds of meals via the Ready Meals Hub in the Instacart App, a new in-app destination featuring prepared foods from grocers like Publix, GIANT, Food Lion, Hannaford, Stop & Shop, Martin’s, and the Kroger grocery chain. In the coming weeks, ready-made meals from ShopRite will also be featured in the Hub. From freshly prepared grab-and-go salads and sandwiches from Publix, to soups and sushi from Kroger, to rotisserie chicken from Food Lion, customers across 35 states can now access the Ready Meals Hub to quickly get prepared meals delivered from more than 4,100 grocery stores.

The U.S. chilled and deli food market size was expected to reach more than $40 billion as of October 2021 and is projected to reach more than $108 billion by 2026, according to market analytics firm Research and Markets. For retailers, order-ahead items and prepared foods are typically more profitable than traditional groceries like produce and packaged goods. Additionally, according to food industry association FMI, ready-made foods can play a big part in people’s daily food prep: most meals in North America are prepared at home (73%), but the majority of these meals involve a combination of prepared and from-scratch elements (55%), and most include time-saving “ready-to-eat” items like pre-made salads and ready-to-eat meat as elements (64%). On the Instacart platform, customers who purchase prepared foods and catering items like hot and cold side dishes, cakes and sushi have significantly larger baskets and shop more frequently than those customers who do not.

This new service has been made possible thanks to Instacart’s recent acquisition of FoodStorm, a SaaS order management system (OMS) that powers end-to-end order-ahead and catering experiences for grocery retailers. FoodStorm’s comprehensive SaaS offering covers multi-channel ordering – ecommerce, phone or in-store kiosk – order management, and payment and fulfillment. Its technology also integrates easily with a large variety of third-party systems including point of sale (POS) systems and offers customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities that help grocers collect feedback, market their offerings and leverage promotional features. Over the coming months, in addition to expanding FoodStorm’s technology to new partners on the Instacart Marketplace, Instacart plans to expand the Ready Meals Hub to feature several more grocers and work to make Ready Meals available to even more retailers.

As Instacart’s release states, “with our new Ready Meals Hub, we’re dishing up inspiring, more affordable and nutritious food alternatives to restaurant delivery that make it easier for consumers to break up with takeout this year. We’re also helping retailers drive more sales and increase their ‘share of stomach’ when it comes to their customers’ daily mealtime decisions. From fresh soups and salads for a quick lunch to take-and-bake casseroles, pasta dishes and meat and seafood entrees for the family dinner, we’re proud to serve as a powerful enablement partner for retailers, creating new ways for them to give busy people and families across the U.S. more ways to shop smart, eat healthy and feed their cravings faster than ever before.”

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