What Brands Need to Know About Instacart in 2026

Instacart’s advertising revenue hit $1.18 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $1.45 billion this year, according to Oberlo. For CPG brands still treating Instacart as a grocery delivery app, that number should force a rethink.

The company that once competed on delivery speed now competes on data. With 14.4 million logged-in shoppers, AI-powered smart carts rolling into physical stores, and ad placements that extend to YouTube and TikTok, Instacart has quietly built the third-largest retail media network in the grocery space. Here’s what you need to know.

Table of Contents

• The Numbers Behind Instacart’s Growth
• Why Instacart Ads Deserve a Closer Look
• Beyond Delivery: Caper Carts and the In-Store Play
• The Retail Media Budget Question
• FAQ
• Final Thoughts

The Numbers Behind Instacart’s Growth

Instacart went public on NASDAQ in September 2023 and has since proven the skeptics wrong on profitability. Full-year 2025 revenue reached $3.74 billion, up 11% year-over-year, with GAAP net income of $447 million and adjusted EBITDA of $1.09 billion - a 29% margin, per the company’s Q4 2025 earnings. Q4 GTV hit $9.85 billion, the company’s strongest quarterly growth in three years.

The online grocery market matured but didn’t stall. US penetration sits at roughly 15% of total grocery sales for full-year 2025 - up from 10% in 2021 but slower than the 20-25% COVID-era forecasts, with Statista projecting 20.5% by 2026. More relevant for brands: 61% of US households now buy groceries online, according to Wave Grocery’s year-end data. The audience is mainstream.

Instacart now partners with over 1,800 retail banners across nearly 100,000 stores in North America - up from roughly 500 when this article was first published. But the real story is what Instacart does with that footprint: it turned a delivery network into an advertising machine.

Why Instacart Ads Deserve a Closer Look

Forget the “Featured Products” format from 2021. Instacart now runs a full advertising suite: Sponsored Products, Shoppable Display, and Universal Campaigns - the last of which launched in March 2025 and uses machine learning to auto-optimize across formats with a single budget. The practical effect for brands is fewer campaigns to manage and better allocation across placements without manual bid-shifting.

The performance data stands out against other retail media networks. Instacart reports a $5.25 grocery ROAS, which it claims is superior to Amazon’s equivalent. CPCs remain meaningfully lower, though exact figures vary by category. Schnucks, a regional grocer using Instacart’s Carrot Ads white-label technology, reported a 5.7x average ROAS and 2.6% click-through rate - numbers that would be exceptional on any platform.

There’s a catch, though. Scale matters. Amazon Ads controls 79.7% of US retail media spend, per eMarketer’s 2025 data. Walmart Connect sits at 8%. Instacart’s roughly $1 billion in ad revenue is meaningful but still a fraction of the $71 billion US retail media market projected for 2026. For brands with limited budgets, the decision isn’t Instacart or Amazon - it’s how much of the allocation goes where.

One friction point brands should plan for: Instacart’s campaign tools are improving fast but still lag Amazon’s maturity. Optimized Bidding with Target ROAS and Smart Budgeting (launched December 2025) help, but expect a steeper learning curve and less granular reporting than what Amazon Advertising offers. Start with a 3.0x ROAS target, learn the platform’s rhythms, and scale from there.

Beyond Delivery: Caper Carts and the In-Store Play

This is the part most brands are underestimating. Instacart’s Caper Carts - AI-powered smart shopping carts using NVIDIA Jetson technology - have nearly tripled their store deployments in the past year. They now operate in roughly 100 cities across 15 states, according to Instacart’s newsroom.

Why should brands care? Because Shoppable Display ads automatically extend to Caper Cart screens. A brand running digital ads on Instacart’s marketplace is simultaneously reaching shoppers in the physical aisle, at the moment they’re deciding between your product and the store brand. Kroger and Walmart have piloted in-store digital screens, but neither connects them to a marketplace ad platform the way Instacart does - that closed loop from online impression to in-aisle screen is genuinely new.

A wrinkle that complicates the pitch: Caper Cart availability is still regional and skews toward independent and mid-size grocers - Wegmans, Schnucks, Big Bunny Market. If your brand’s distribution is concentrated in chains that haven’t adopted the carts, the in-store ad reach is theoretical. Check where your top-selling retailers stand before building a campaign around in-aisle impressions.

For brands targeting value-conscious shoppers, though, the carts offer something the app doesn’t. Recent additions include EBT SNAP eligibility tracking and a Cart Cash rewards program that reaches shoppers who may never download Instacart.

The Retail Media Budget Question

The honest answer for most CPG brands: you probably need to be on Instacart, but you need to right-size the investment.

DoorDash now accounts for roughly a third of US grocery delivery platform sales, with Uber Eats and Instacart each holding about 20%, per Supermarket News. Instacart’s edge isn’t delivery market share - it’s the advertising infrastructure. With 240+ retail partners on Carrot Ads and off-platform activation through YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and The Trade Desk, Instacart is the only network that spans online marketplace, in-store smart carts, and off-platform programmatic in a single ecosystem. For brands building an omnichannel presence, that matters.

Here’s where it gets counterintuitive: Instacart’s data advantage depends on logged-in users. Its 14.4 million active shoppers generate deterministic purchase data - no probabilistic matching, no cookie dependency. That’s a genuinely better signal than most retail media can offer. But 14.4 million is a fraction of Amazon’s reach. The brands getting the best results aren’t choosing between them - they’re using Instacart’s closed-loop data to test creative and targeting hypotheses at lower CPCs, then scaling what works to Amazon. We see this across our client base: brands with 60%+ grocery revenue treat Instacart as a core channel, while those under 30% treat it as a test budget.

FAQ

How much does it cost to advertise on Instacart?

Instacart uses CPC bidding for Sponsored Products and first-price CPM for Shoppable Display. CPCs run lower than Amazon - pantry staples often sit under $0.50, while competitive categories like snacks and beverages spike on weekends. Start with Optimized Bidding at a 3.0x ROAS target, learn which categories convert, then carve out manual bids for hero SKUs that consistently over-perform.

What ad formats does Instacart offer brands?

Sponsored Products, Shoppable Display, and Universal Campaigns. Universal Campaigns consolidate both formats with ML optimization - one budget, one campaign, and the algorithm figures out where to put the spend. Ads also extend to Caper Cart screens in physical stores and off-platform channels via RPM (Instacart’s programmatic network).

How does Instacart compare to Amazon for CPG advertising?

They’re complementary, not competitive. Amazon offers unmatched scale (79.7% of retail media spend) and mature tooling. Instacart offers higher grocery-specific ROAS ($5.25 reported), lower CPCs, and the unique Caper Cart in-store placement. Most brands allocate the majority to Amazon and use Instacart for incremental grocery-specific reach.

Is Instacart profitable?

Yes - $447 million GAAP net income in 2025 on a 29% adjusted EBITDA margin.

Final Thoughts

The Instacart that CPG brands ignored in 2021 is not the Instacart they can afford to ignore now. A $3.74 billion revenue company with physical hardware in grocery aisles, a mature ad ecosystem reaching 7,500+ brands, and off-platform reach into YouTube and TikTok - that’s a channel, not an experiment. The question for brands is how aggressively to invest in a platform where CPCs are still lower and ROAS is still higher than the retail media giant down the road. Feedvisor’s AI-powered platform helps brands optimize advertising across every marketplace - start your free, 14-day trial to see how unified analytics changes the math.