Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Instacart

Instacart Released a Feature to Battle Tip-Baiting

As if a braving stores during a global pandemic wasn’t enough for Instacart’s Shoppers (the gig workers who actually go into the grocery stores and make the deliveries), they’ve also had to deal with tip-baiting. Tip-baiting is when a customer entices a Shopper with the promise of a big tip, only to rescind that tip once the delivery is made. It’s a tactic some customers would use during especially busy times to get their delivery faster.

Disgusting, right?

On Friday, Instacart launched a new feature to help combat tip-baiting. TechCrunch writes that users who remove their tip after the delivery must provide feedback as to why it’s being changed. Users also now have only 24 hours to change a tip, down from the previous three-day window. (Ed. note: why did they allow a three day window in the first place?) Additionally, repeat tip removers will have their accounts deactivated.

Instacart said that tip-baiting wasn’t rampant and represented less than .5 percent of orders.

The move is the latest in a string of changes Instacart has had to make on the fly during this pandemic. The grocery delivery startup was thrust into the limelight over the past months, becoming an essential service as lockdowns and general fear of COVID-19 prevented people from going to the grocery store.

The record-setting, sudden influx of online grocery shoppers meant big changes for Instacart, including boosting the size of it network to 750,000 Shoppers, adding new grocery order features, and providing more health and safety measures for its Shoppers. There’s also been backlash from its Shoppers, many of which went on strike over the inadequacy of those health and safety measures, as well as the company’s default tipping policy.

As states start to re-open, questions remain about if and how people will return to the grocery store. The online grocery shopping boom will most likely come to an end this summer and from there will pivot to see how many e-commerce curious remain once the in-person option is once again available.

In the meantime, tip your Instacart, and every delivery driver, generously!

Instacart Now Has 500,000 Shoppers, Adding Another 250,000 to Meet Demand

Instacart appears to be right smack in the middle of a Venn diagram of the humongous demand for online grocery delivery and decimated job market where people need work.

Exactly one month ago Instacart announced that it would add 300,000 new Shoppers (the gig workers who do the shopping and actual delivery) to its ranks over the ensuing three months. Today, the company announced that not only has it already met that goal, bringing its total Shopper count to 500,000, but it is adding another 250,000 Shoppers to keep up with orders.

According to a press announcement emailed to The Spoon, Instacart’s order volume grew by more than 500 percent year-over-year last week, and average customer basket sizes increased by 35 percent. The quarter-million new Shoppers will be focused on 6 main regions with the most demand including California, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington D.C. and Toronto.

Grocery retailers and delivery services like Instacart have struggled to keep up with the sheer volume of online grocery orders from people sheltering in place. Actually getting a delivery time can be worth more than gold in some regions of the country, with delivery window only available weeks out. Earlier this month, Instacart added new features like order ahead to help alleviate some of the strain. But ultimately, with stay at home orders seeming like they will be here for a while for most of the country, Instacart just needs people.

This need for more Shoppers also comes at a time when a record number of people are losing their jobs. With restaurants closing along with other non-essential services there are millions of people looking to make some much-needed money. Being a gig worker won’t provide benefits, but it can mean making an income.

It’s important to remember, however, that these eventual 750,000 gig workers are also putting themselves at risk. They are going into the grocery stores and bringing food to the people who won’t leave their own houses for fear of catching the virus.

Along with today’s headcount announcement, the company also announced another round of new COVID-19 protections and services for its Shoppers. Instacart now has a daily in-app Shopper wellness check to monitor health, extended sick pay for workers afflicted with or isolated by COVID-19, extended bonuses for in-store teams until the end of the pandemic, and easier access to health and safety kits.

Instacart’s COVID-19 response record has been mixed at best. Shoppers got so fed up with what they perceived as insufficient protections that they went on strike earlier this month. Though labor relations evidently haven’t stopped people at home from using the service (just make sure you tip generously if you do!).

With more people getting used to shopping for groceries at home, this demand for Instacart could be sustained for some time even beyond the pandemic, requiring hundreds of thousands of more Shoppers.

Updated: Instacart Announces (More) New Gig Worker Protection Measures, But Strike Still On

Instacart announced new work and safety measures for its gig workforce, also known as Instacart shoppers. The announcement comes on the eve of what could be a nationwide strike of its Shoppers, who are protesting conditions they are working under during this coronavirus outbreak.

The nationwide strike was called for last week by Vanessa Bain, an Instacart Shopper in response to what she said was a lack of safety precautions the company was providing, a lack of hazard pay for the Shoppers (who are braving public interactions during this time of shelter-in-place), as well as pay for workers afflicted with or isolated by COVID-19.

On Friday, Instacart announced a number of new initiatives for its Shoppers, most of which addressed issues around pay, but did not address concerns around hygiene and physical safety. Bain, however, was not swayed by Instacart’s new moves and still called for the nationwide to happen tomorrow, Monday, March 30.

Today, Instacart announced even more new measures for its gig workers, including addressing issues around safety. Instacart, for instance, is getting into the hand sanitizer business, writing:

…Instacart worked with a third-party to manufacture its own hand sanitizer for Instacart shoppers to overcome the existing inventory delays and global supply chain scarcity, without taking away resources from healthcare workers. The product is a liquid spray ethyl alcohol-based hand sanitizer, which will ship in the next week. The independently-developed hand sanitizer that Instacart is providing meets CDC guidance for alcohol-based hand sanitizer and can be used when soap and water are not readily available.

Instacart is also revising its tip policy:

Beginning today, all existing customers’ completed orders will now default to the customer’s last tip amount, instead of the previous 5% tip default setting. The new customer tip default feature leverages order recollection technology, which remembers a customer’s previous tip and automatically sets it as their new default tip for all future orders. For example, if a customer tips 15% to their shopper for great service, their next Instacart order will automatically default to a 15% tip as well, versus defaulting back to the previous 5% default tip. Instacart is also removing the “none” option in the customer tip settings, requiring customers to manually change their tip to $0 if desired and making it less likely that a customer will remove the shopper tip altogether. Additionally, if a customer lowers the tip below 5%, the default will reset to 5% to ensure shoppers continue to have a baseline tip amount. 

Will these new steps be enough? We reached out to Bain to see if Instacart’s moves will be enough to avert the strike. With grocery delivery thrust into the spotlight and suddenly more important than ever, it’s in everyone’s best interests (Instacart, it’s gig workers on the front lines of this pandemic, and customers) to keep things rolling.

UPDATE: In a Medium post, Bain has called these new measure “a sick joke” and says that the strike is still on.

We will be following this developing story.

UPDATED: Instacart Launches New Benefits as its Gig Workers Planned to Strike

Update: This post has been updated with a statement sent to the Spoon by Vanessa Bain.

Grocery delivery startup Instacart today announced a number of new benefits for its Shoppers (the gig workers who actually go into the stores and deliver food). The new benefits come as Instacart shoppers were planning a nationwide strike this coming Monday, March 30, as first reported by Vice’s Motherboard.

The proposed strike was called in response to what was being called Instacart’s insufficient response to the dangers its Shoppers face during this COVID-19 epidemic. Vanessa Bain, an Instacart Shopper who has spearheaded previous gig worker stoppages at Instacart over its pay structure, laid out demands in a post on Medium:

On Monday, March 30, Shoppers will walk off of our jobs, and will not return to work until our demands are met. We demand that Instacart meet the following conditions:

  1. Safety precautions at no cost to workers — PPE (at minimum hand sanitizer, disinfectant wipes/sprays and soap).
  2. Hazard pay — an extra $5 per order and defaulting the in-app tip amount to at least 10% of the order total.
  3. An extension and expansion of pay for workers impacted by COVID-19 — anyone who has a doctor’s note for either a preexisting condition that’s a known risk factor or requiring a self-quarantine.
  4. The deadline to qualify for these benefits must be extended beyond April 8th.

As Bain rightly points out, gig workers are on the front lines of this pandemic, venturing into public grocery stores on behalf of others, and making deliveries to strangers’ front doors. They are putting themselves at risk so people like you and me don’t have to venture out.

In a corporate blog post today, Instacart launched a number of new measures and benefits it was adding to help its Shoppers, including:

  • Extending pay for those unable to work because they are stuck with COVID-19 or placed in isolation or quarantine because of the disease
  • Additional bonuses for Shoppers ranging from $25 to $200
  • Additional pay boosts through batch promotions
  • Contactless alcohol delivery

Instacart also provided this statement via email to The Spoon:

“The health and safety of our entire community — shoppers, customers, and employees — is our first priority. Our goal is to offer a safe and flexible earnings opportunity to shoppers, while also proactively taking the appropriate precautionary measures to operate safely. We want to underscore that we absolutely respect the rights of shoppers to provide us feedback and voice their concerns. It’s a valuable way for us to continuously make improvements to the shopper experience and we’re committed to supporting this important community during this critical time.”

Will Instacart’s new moves be enough to ward off the strike? We reached out to Bain on Twitter, and will update this post as soon as we hear back. UPDATE: Bain sent us the following response:

Instacart’s response lacks any real substance. While I am glad they agreed to our fourth demand to extend the eligibility period for COVID-19 pay, they’ve provided no meaningful concessions to our demands in full. It’s far too little too late. We are still calling for an emergency walk off/work stoppage until our demands are met in full.

Instacart is busier than ever, thanks to people sheltering in place and social distancing, and to better accommodate its surge in demand, the company is looking to bring on an additional 300,000 shoppers in the coming months.

With unemployment spiking amid business closures, a lot of people will be looking to Instacart for some kind of steady paycheck. Ensuring that its growing workforce is fully prepared to face the challenges of this outbreak seems not only reasonable, but the morally correct thing to do. On a more personal note, I literally just got my parents to start using Instacart, and I’m sure they aren’t the only elderly (read: more at risk) people who are doing so. So here’s hoping Instacart and its Shoppers can iron all this out and truly be a force for good in these trying times.

The Food Tech Show: Instacarting Parents & Baking Bread Might be Our New Normal

As the pandemic rolls on and we stay at home while social distancing, many of us are exploring new ways of doing things.

For some this may mean Instacarting one’s parents. For others, it may mean making sourdough bread and showing off your efforts on Instagram.

The Spoon crew all dialed in from their remote locations to discuss how our behavior has changed as well as the continuing fallout of COVID-19 on restaurants. We also discuss the surge in hiring in the grocery sector as people shift their behavior to online shopping and whether or not COVID-19 could mean a comeback for meal kits.

As always, you can listen to the Food Tech Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. You can also download it direct to your device or just click play below.

Instacart to Add 300,000 Shoppers

Instacart is bulking up. The company announced today that it is responding to the surge in demand for its grocery delivery services by adding 300,000 shoppers to its platform over the next three months.

Instacart shoppers are the workers the company uses to go into stores, pick out the items customers order and deliver them. In a corporate blog post, Instacart Founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta wrote:

Today, we have more shoppers on the Instacart platform than ever before. Given the continued customer demand we expect over the coming months, we’ll be bringing on an additional 300,000 full-service shoppers to support cities nationwide. As more people look for immediate, flexible earnings opportunities during this time, we hope that Instacart can be an additional source of income for those looking to earn while also delivering for the communities in which they live.

Instacart operates in more than 5,500 cities. In a press release announcing the news, Instacart said that in the past few weeks, it has seen order volume grow by more than 150 percent year-over-year, with average customer basket size also increasing by 15 percent. The additional 300,000 full-service shoppers will more than double the size of its shopper workforce.

That the company is seeing such a spike in demand is not surprising. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced people into stocking up for what could be a long haul indoors. Many people adopting social distancing find it easier to have food delivered rather than interact with the (potentially contagious) general public at the grocery store.

I count myself among that surge in Instacart traffic even though it’s not available where I live. Instead I used it to order food for my elderly parents who are in a high-risk population and still stubborn about going to the grocery store in person.

Anyone who has tried to order groceries online recently has assuredly run into lengthy delays (I ordered from Safeway a week and half ago and it arrives tomorrow)(hopefully) and out-of-stock error messages. Instacart is among a number of companies looking to hire a lot of people immediately. Amazon wants to bring on 100,000 people for its delivery operations, Kroger is hiring 10,000 across the country, and Walmart plans to hire 150,000 new workers.

With COVID-19 decimating the restaurant industry and estimates that five to seven million service and kitchen jobs could be lost, any job could be a lifeline for those in need until this pandemic passes.

Just remember that all these Instacart, Amazon, Kroger and Walmart workers are on the front lines, putting themselves at risk going into stores and to your homes. So be kind and tip them generously.

My Elderly Parents Kept Going to the Grocery Store, So I Finally Instacarted for Them (and It was Great!)

Parents, especially elderly ones, can be stubborn. They have their routines and will stick to ’em by gum. For my septuagenarian parents, it’s going to their local grocery store, which they love (my dad actually had his 65th birthday party there).

But as the COVID-19 shroud continues to unfurl across the nation and people are being asked to stay at home, going to the grocery store, especially if you’re elderly (sorry, mom!), seems like not such a great idea anymore.

We’ve already seen some grocery stores create special, early hours where only seniors can shop, which is a good idea. But honestly, I would prefer if my parents didn’t have to go out in the world at all, at least for the next few weeks.

I’ve been telling them about online grocery shopping since this pandemic began, and how it could be an option for them to get food without leaving their house. They politely nodded and said that yes that was an option, and then went to the store anyway. My mother in particular is pretty tech-savvy, so the concept of getting groceries online wasn’t scary to her; I think it was more about their routines.

As this pandemic transmogrified a full-on international crisis, I upped the pressure on my parents to give up the grocery store. But they kept going. I don’t live near them (otherwise I’d shop for them), so finally yesterday I Instacarted for them. And it was fantastic.

I live in a rural area where Instacart isn’t available, so I hadn’t used the service yet. But after downloading the app, I was able to plug in my parents’ address, find their local store, and start shopping.

My Instacart Shopper was super helpful at finding product replacements.

My mom sent a list of items and I placed the order. While I was expecting deliveries to be delayed at least a few days, surprisingly there was a same-day window. Aces!

What I appreciated was how my shopper, Julia, was communicative throughout the whole process. Understandably, a lot of what I ordered was out of stock, so she sent suggestions and photos of options (or lack thereof, almost all of the bread was gone). Finally, I left instructions for her to just drop off the groceries on my parents’ front porch (no touching!). Julia sent me a pic when the delivery was done and I FaceTimed my parents to let them know.

I’m deeply aware that we are asking more of gig workers and delivery people than ever before. In this case, Julia is literally helping keep my parents fed. Instacart has a pretty crappy track record when it comes to treating its workers well. Given that their shoppers are on the front lines of this pandemic, Instacart better damn well step up and do the right thing (all of the tip I left should have gone to Julia). It would also be cool if Instacart offered something similar to Chatt.us, wherein you could buy groceries for someone else in need (because with all the restaurant closures and job losses, there is going to be a lot of need).

I realize that many of you reading this are probably saying Duh, Chris, we know all about Instacart. Great! I’m sharing this story because in these strange times, we can re-think how we use our existing resources to help others. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from a bunch of friends who are struggling with their parents going out for groceries. If you are concerned for your elderly parents, and have the means and can use a tool like Instacart or Safeway online or Walmart for them, maybe consider it.

Will this experiment push my parents into online grocery shopping? I don’t know yet, they say they are stocked for a few weeks. But hopefully when I bring up Instacart again, they won’t just nod their head politely.

We’re spending every day tracking the impact of COVID-19 on the world of food. Subscribe to our newsletter to get our analysis and hear stories from the front lines.

Uber, DoorDash and Others ‘In Talks’ to Compensate Drivers Affected By Coronavirus

Under pressure to offer more protection to workers, major gig economy companies are considering setting up a fund to compensate drivers affected by the coronavirus, according to The Wall Street Journal. Uber, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash, and Postmates are “in talks” to see how they can come together to set up a fund to pay workers infected by or quarantined with the virus.

Food delivery drivers are in high demand right now as more Americans are working from home or simply staying away from restaurants in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. Postmates and Instacart have responded by implementing contactless delivery options where drivers simply leave food on the doorstep instead of handing it off directly to the customer.  

Those measures mitigate some risk. However, they don’t account for the fact that gig economy workers are classified as contractors in most states, which means they don’t get paid for time off, including sick leave. In some cases, taking time off for illness could drastically affect workers’ livelihoods. One worker told the WSJ that “staying home won’t pay the bills.”

That puts delivery drivers in a tough position: stay home and miss earning essential income, or work even when you’re feeling sick and potentially risk further spreading coronavirus. While this conundrum is true of many, many types of workers right now, gig workers are in especially high demand as more people order food in, rather than go out to restaurants. 

The aforementioned companies are expected to make a decision about this potential fund in a few days.  Uber has already said it will compensate up to 14 days for both rideshare drivers and delivery drivers diagnosed or quarantined with coronavirus.

Compensating affected drivers is just one of many issues around worker treatment for which delivery companies have come under fire recently. Uber, Lyft, and Postmates are on the list of gig economy companies currently fighting California’s Assembly Bill 5 — also known as the “gig worker bill” — which reclassifies those workers as employees and entitles them to certain benefits — including paid sick leave. DoorDash and Instacart famously made a lot of enemies in 2019 over their worker tipping policies. Meanwhile, advocacy groups like Gig Workers Rising and Gig Workers Collective are putting pressure on tech companies to enact better labor policies.

One possible result of the current outbreak is that it could prioritize the issue of gig workers’ rights and spur both regulators and tech companies into action faster. Coronavirus isn’t the last public health crisis we’ll see in our lifetimes. As gig economy jobs become the norm for a growing number of the population, ensuring better protection for workers’ health needs to be built right into the job description. 

Postmates, Instacart Join No Human Contact Delivery Efforts in the U.S.

Food delivery service Postmates today announced what it’s calling Dropoff Options, a function that lets customers choose how they want to receive their deliveries. According to a company blog post, users can “choose to meet their Postmate at the door, as they have before, meet curbside, or go non-contact and have deliveries left at the door.” 

Postmates customers order their meals as usual then select their delivery method during the checkout process (see image above).

The post itself doesn’t mention coronavirus, but it doesn’t have to. Around the world, delivery services now offer various forms of this contactless delivery, where couriers and customers have no physical contact and in some cases don’t even see one another face to face. 

The bulk of the efforts so far have been in China, where the outbreak originated. Restaurant chains and delivery services — Ele.me, Meituan, McDonald’s, and KFC, to name just a few — are working together to limit the amount of human contact that happens during food delivery dropoffs. Drivers and couriers must wear masks, have their temperature taken, and disinfect their hands and delivery bags before and after each run.

South Korea’s top two delivery services, Baedal Minjok and Yogiyo, have also seen an uptick in food delivery orders and requests for couriers to leave packages on the doorstep.

Stateside, Postmates isn’t alone in its efforts to introduce more contactless delivery. As Business Insider noted, Instacart has also implemented contactless delivery with a service called “Leave at My Door Delivery.” The grocery delivery company told BI that it has actually been testing this service for several months and decided to make it available to all customers after seeing a “surge” in demand for it.

With “Leave at My Door Delivery,” Instacart customers can opt to have their grocery orders left at their doorstep during the designated timeframe for their order. 

Other food delivery companies, including Grubhub, DoorDash, and Uber Eats, have not yet implemented any kind of contactless delivery for their operations.

These new services from Postmates and Instacart so far only address the issue of one human getting close to another. They do not yet address steps like disinfecting the insulated delivery bags couriers use or taking workers’ temperatures — actions that are as much about the safety of drivers and couriers as they are about customers. One Instacart worker told the Financial Times that the company still wasn’t providing items like hand sanitizer or disinfectants. While Instacart’s new contactless delivery is “a step in the right direction,” it doesn’t “reduce our overall risks of exposure because most of our risks we actually encounter while shopping,” the worker said. 

Instacart workers in particular are exposed to more germs because part of their job involves moving around a grocery store, touching a shopping cart, and picking up items from shelves. But all gig economy companies should be factoring in the safety of their workers as they implement contactless delivery services.

Which is where the robots may come in. My colleague Chris Albrect has written more than once, we live in a time when delivery robots and driverless vehicles are actually available. Undelv has already said it would make its driverless delivery vans available to deliver food, medicine, and other supplies to quarantined areas. And as Chris pointed out, rover bots like those from Starship or Kiwi “could be an easy humanless way to deliver meals and medicines around the clock in densely populated areas.” I would add drone technology to that list of possible solutions.

Granted, outsourcing delivery jobs to drones would eat into gig workers’ pay. As well, a number of regulatory issues around autonomous delivery vehicles have yet to be addressed, which limits how widely these technologies can even be used. But whether by robot, masked workers, or some other solution that’s yet to be thought of, the contactless delivery method will get way more popular in the next few months — and probably alter the food delivery landscape for good in the process.

Ready Meal Delivery From Grocery Stores Could Be a Really Big Deal

It’s not uncommon in the Albrecht house to, at four o’clock in the afternoon, realize that we don’t have anything really for dinner. More often than not, the solution is to swing by the grocery store and pick up a broiler chicken from the hot bar. And while we’re at it, maybe a salad and sides too.

It’s a lot cheaper than getting a restaurant meal, and we can bundle it in with any other groceries we need to get. Plus, while we have done nothing other than pay, having a roast chicken kinda provides the illusion that the family is eating a home cooked meal.

Instacart announced this week that it was rolling out delivery of made-to-order foods, and this move could be a very big deal. And not just for the Albrechts.

The Instacart press announcement mentioned the deli counter of a grocery store in particular, but it’s not hard to imagine all of the hot bar and salad bar areas of a retailer jumping on board. Rotisserie chickens, flatbread pizzas, orzo salads all of it available for delivery to customers.

Supermarkets are already focusing more on prepared foods. A Progressive Grocer Retail Deli Review survey last year found:

The vast majority of survey respondents said that their prepared food programs are increasing both in dollar (78 percent) and unit (80 percent) sales. Additionally, nearly 70 percent of respondents said that they’re either “significantly” or “modestly” increasing the space devoted to prepared foods.

While online grocery shopping is still a small percentage of overall grocery sales, adding the ability to get hot, prepared grocery food delivered to your door is a good way for a retailer to get a halo of additional sales online. Much like when I pick up a roast chicken, I also get milk and probably a dessert of some kind, it’s likely that when ordering a hot, prepared meal I’d throw a few more things into the basket.

In particular, Amazon and Walmart could get a nice jolt from selling more prepared foods for delivery. A quick perusal of Amazon/Whole Foods and Walmart websites shows that they currently offer some prepared foods for delivery, but there is a lot of room to add more. Given the lightning fast logistics of both companies (Amazon Prime members get two hour delivery, Walmart offers Delivery Unlimited), it’s not hard to envision just in time delivery of a hot dinner to your door.

Additionally, think about all the new types of data that could be gleaned selling prepared meals for delivery would translate into. In addition to a customer’s CPG buying habits, the company would get much more insight at what people eat and they actually eat it.

For its part, Instacart can provide the delivery and logistics to its retail partners, but then retailers are turning over that customer relationship to a third-party delivery service. If made-to-go meal delivery takes off, it could wind up biting Instacart in the basket and retailers bring that customer relationship back in-house.

This could also set up another front in the third-party delivery wars. Postmates, Door Dash and Uber Eats have dabbled in grocery, leaving it mostly to Instacart. But when the groceries you’re delivering are actual hot meals for dinner, you could see Door Dash and Uber Eats get more aggressive about forming grocery relationships.

There are still plenty of ifs, surrounding the idea of delivery of made-to-go meals from grocery stores. But at least Instacart isn’t too chicken to try the idea out.

Instacart and Publix to Launch a ‘Digital Deli Counter’ for Made-to-Order Meals

Instacart announced today it is expanding its partnership with Publix to include a solution that will let the supermarket chain’s customers get made-to-order meals for delivery and pickup via the Instacart app.

Called Instacart Meals, the service will, in the words of Instacart, act as a “digital deli counter” where customers can choose items like sub sandwiches and other deli fare. Customers access Meals via the Instacart storefront and can add menu items, including “build-your-own” sandwich options, to their regular grocery cart. An Instacart shopper will pick up the deli items just as they would fulfill an order for groceries. 

This is Instacart’s first venture into made-to-order meal delivery — an apparently lucrative area for supermarkets these days. “Made-to-order food counters are among the fastest-growing aisles in the grocery store. These items represent up to 15% of sales for our grocery partners and have among the highest margins of anything sold in-store,” Instacart President Nilam Ganenthiran said in a statement. 

That popularity makes sense given the uptick in online order and delivery among the general population. And in many cases, it could be a cheaper option for consumers when it comes to ordering a quick bite. Delivery fees are expensive, and if a customer can simply order lunch on top of the evening’s groceries, they would theoretically wind up paying less in taxes as well as service and delivery fees. 

A pilot of the service will roll out in Orlando, Florida over the next few weeks before expanding to other Publix stores around the state. From there, Instacart Meals will make its way into all of the chain’s stores in the Southeastern U.S. “in the coming months.”  

Newsletter: Third-party Food Delivery Keeps on Fighting, But Its Opponent Is Getting Stronger

This is the web version of our weekly newsletter. Subscribe and get all the best food tech news and analysis delivered directly to your inbox!

It’s getting to be that time when us journalists haul out the predictions for the coming year. You can be sure we here at The Spoon will have plenty of those in the coming weeks. And you can be sure some of them will center around the how the food delivery model could change in the wake of the many controversies its currently mired in. Exorbitant commissions for restaurants, antitrust accusations, paying workers a wage they can’t live on — all this and more (did I mention plummeting stock?) underscores the same point: the third-party food delivery model is unsustainable, far from profitable, and larger swaths of the entire food industry are starting to push back. Hard.

Another log went on that fire last week when online grocery fulfillment platform Instacart cut bonuses for its Shoppers — that is, the folks getting groceries off the shelf and delivering them to customers’ houses. Oh, and it just so happened that this cut, which can reportedly account for up to 40 percent of some Shoppers’ earnings per order, came just days after said Shoppers instituted a protest over previous changes to their pay.

Instacart says the new pay cut is “not a form of retaliation.” Whether that’s completely true or not seems irrelevant. It’s a bad look for Instacart, who, along with DoorDash and Postmates, already came under fire earlier this year for its worker-tipping policy.

Then there’s the fight over AB 5, California’s so-called “gig worker bill,” which was signed into law recently and reclassifies gig workers as actual employees. Instacart is not in on that fight, but DoorDash, Uber, and Lyft are, and they’ve vowed to spend $90 million in 2020 to get a ballot measure passed that would counteract AB 5. Talk about a bad look.

Plus, even if these companies overturn the protections laid out in AB 5, they will still face an endless series of new bills, laws, and regulations that will undercut their core business model and further put the question of profitability in question. Meanwhile, investors are getting antsy, and restaurants themselves are starting to take pieces of the delivery chain, from branding to retaining customer data, back in-house, further eroding the reach of third-party delivery.

Instacart, DoorDash, Uber, and others can fight all they want, but their opponents are getting undeniably stronger. Grab your (delivered) popcorn and sit back. The battle is far from over.

Food Delivery Services Pile On New Features
One fighting tactic for food delivery services is far simpler than pledging tens of millions of dollars to fight legislation: pile on the features in the hopes of attracting more customers and restaurant partners.

This week, Deliveroo announced a pickup feature that lets customers order food via the app then collect it themselves, bypassing the delivery fee on the way. The move could appeal to more cost-conscious folks. Customers ordering food might not want to pay a $5 delivery fee for a restaurant that’s a three-minute walk away. And some restaurants could find the option appealing as it would allow them to work with these off-premise order platforms but pay them slightly lower commission fees.

Uber Eats also recently announced some discounts for its restaurant parters — specifically those who use the Ordermark system, which funnels delivery orders from different third-party channels into the restaurant’s main POS system. Ordermark restaurant customers who sign up to use Uber Eats through the Ordermark platform will receive discounted rates.

Eats is also selling ad space inside its platform to restaurants. “If we have all the restaurants on the marketplace and we give them tools to help them grow, then this will be a very efficient marketplace,” Uber told TechCrunch.

The Robots Are Coming (For Your Food Order)
In another likely scenario for the future, we won’t need a gig economy because the robots will do it all.

At least, they’ll be able to do an awful lot of peddling restaurant and grocery deliveries to customers’ apartments and houses. With delivery robots roving around college campuses, some cities, and now Russia, it’s possible — nay, inevitable — that delivery services will render the debate over human workers pointless by replacing said humans with these six-wheeled bots.

So too will autonomous vehicles. Amid far more controversial statements this week, Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi’s said autonomous ride-hailing is probably five to ten years off, and that there will be some autonomous driving going in just three to five years for simple tasks and routes.

Writing about the Uber news, my colleague Chris Albrecht points out that “food delivery certainly seems like it could fit the bill when it comes to simple tasks and routes” and that autonomous vehicles nix the cost of human drivers. But he also rightly notes that “this displacement of human labor brings up its own societal issues.” Which means robots and autonomous vehicles could potentially resolve some of the fight around the gig economy, but they’ll open up a fresh can of worms when it comes to the ethics of the food delivery model.