• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 28, 2022

Instacart launched a health initiative Wednesday focused on products, partnerships, research and policies to help consumers make better nutritional choices and highlight the ways they can use food as medicine to heal body, mind, and spirit.

More than one in 10 Americans do not have reliable access to nutritious food, and 85% of U.S. healthcare costs come from treating chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, according to the USDA.

Instacart Health will support making a difference around Nutrition Security, Making Healthier Choices Easier, and Food as Medicine.

“We want to makes sure everyone has access to nutritious food, and the information they need to lead healthier lives,” Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart, said in a video.

She believes that online grocery services now give people, who previously did not, have access to fresh food, delivered to their door. At least 97% of the household across the country. The company also is working to make online grocery shopping more affordable.

Instacart Health is an initiative, not a product. Within the company initiative, brands can participate by sponsoring health and wellness focused Carts and Pop-Ups. 

Efforts to increase access and affordability include partnering with the U.S. government to pioneer projects like EBT SNAP, a retailer onboarding process that enables these types of payments. It spans more than 8,000 stores across 49 states and Washington, D.C., with the goal of providing payment access to all Instacart grocery partners by 2030.

Shopping in stores with SNAP benefits in 2023 will allow customers to shop via Instacart using their Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) benefits, a government cash assistance program that helps low-income families purchase everyday essentials. The goal is to expand TANF access to all Instacart retail partners by 2030.

Within the Instacart Health initiative, the company today launched Fresh Funds, a new product that enables any organization — from non-profits to employers, to insurance companies or health systems — to give people funds to buy nutritious food from grocery retailers on our platform, in order to increase nutrition access and incentivize healthy habits.

A special Instacart digital stipend limited to certain food categories, such as produce will give people easier access to healthy foods and essentials that may otherwise be cost-prohibitive.

A Fresh Funds pilot with Partnership for a Healthier America, a nonprofit, will launch in the coming weeks in Indianapolis. The Good Food for All program aims to expand nationwide in 2023.

Instacart also launched a long-term partnership with Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA), centered on a commitment to bring 10 million servings of fruits and vegetables to families across the U.S. during the next three years. With this commitment, Instacart will support PHA’s commitment to bring 100 million servings of fruits and vegetables to nutrition insecure families with fundraising campaigns, joint programming and technology offerings to further our joint mission of nutrition security.

And once people have reliable access to affordable and nutritious food, the company believes it can help empower them to make more informed decisions and find healthy inspiration that meets their needs, tastes and budgets. To help people make healthier choices, Instacart recently partnered with health influencers and experts to share the contents of their shopping Carts, so that people can get new ideas for healthy meal planning and discover new healthy products. 

Now the company is expanding on its Health Tags and Healthy Recipe Library of foods through an expanded partnership with Hearst Magazines, and a partnership with Found, a weight care clinic in the United States focused on personalized behavior change and biology, to make their expert-developed nutrition guidance and recipes shoppable via Instacart.

There are many more programs within this initiative such as benefits for low-income families and shoppable lists for dietitians.