Instacart's big year in healthcare

San Francisco-based last-mile delivery service Instacart has made major inroads in the world of medicine over the last 12 months—and it's making sure their customers know, with a recent blog post by Instacart CEO Fidji Simo. 

The blog post comes roughly two months after Instacart went public, selling shares on Nasdaq. It has since seen its share price drop from an opening price of $42 to as low as $24.43 late last week.  

In the essay, Simo notes Instacart Health, which was launched in fall of 2022, has expanded access to customers using SNAP benefits and is working on food-as-medicine initiatives with healthcare organizations such as Kaiser Permanente, Mount Sinai Health Systems and others.  

That’s only a few of the projects the company has spearheaded through its health program, according to Simo. “Right now, more than one in 10 Americans do not have reliable access to nutritious food, and more than 100 million people in the U.S. suffer from diet-related diseases. Annual national healthcare spending on diet-related diseases has topped more than $1 trillion a year—equal to all the money currently spent on groceries each year,” Simo wrote.  

She said that although the healthcare community has known about the need for preventative medicine for years, doctors are still prescribing medication before prescribing an effective diet. The problem is due in large part to the fact that tools haven’t existed to easily prescribe nutritious food, and insurers typically don’t consider it an eligible expense, she explained. 

The current state of healthcare and its shortcomings have prompted Instacart to develop "scalable programs for providers, payers, hospital systems and more to put nutritious food in the hands of people in a convenient, accessible and affordable way,” Simo said.  

She said Instacart’s initiatives focus on three main areas: partnering with healthcare providers and others to scale food-as-medicine programs; expanding access to healthy food for online shoppers; and advancing research on food prescriptions. 

In their efforts to scale food as medicine, the company launched a program in early October through a partnership with Mount Sinai Solutions, a division of Mount Sinai Health System, to provide customizable food stipends for post-operative and post-partum patients.

"The new program is designed to alleviate challenges to accessing fresh groceries, pantry staples and household essentials following a major life event, such as a joint replacement, birth or bariatric surgery,” Instacart said in the Oct. 4 announcement. 

Instacart also announced a partnership in March with Boston Children’s Hospital to provide food-as-medicine programs. Dr. John Brownstein, chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital, said in March that the hospital looks forward to exploring the technology to better serve patients with specific dietary needs. “Food and nutrition programs are essential to disease treatment and prevention,” Brownstein said in a statement in March.  

On the other end of the age spectrum, Instacart launched a partnership with Medically Home, which provides in-home hospice care for elderly patients, to get food and supplies to customers where they live. 

Simo also touted Instacart’s work in expanding online grocery delivery for those using SNAP benefits. Instacart helped pioneer the technology used to process SNAP payments for online orders, but earlier this year, the company expanded the program to all 50 states, enabling nearly 95% of the 42 million SNAP recipients to use the delivery service.  

“Families who grocery shop online also purchase more fruits and vegetables than in-store shoppers, without increasing their total grocery bill, meaning more people are making more conscious, informed choices using our platform,” according to Simo. 

Instacart is taking it further in 2024, expanding the ability to process online orders through supplemental health benefits through programs including Medicare Advantage and Medicaid.  

The company’s efforts to support those in need also was bolstered this year through the nonprofit Partnership for a Healthier America and the city of Indianapolis to provide 10 weeks of produce to 640 recipients and $50 monthly stipends through its “Fresh Funds” program.   

The program is now expanding to Denver, Colorado; Englewood, New Jersey; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Washington, D.C., Simo said.  

“We believe food as medicine can make people healthier and reduce the cost of care, and we want to prove it. That’s why we are working with integrated managed care systems, universities, medical centers and research foundations across the U.S. to use our technology to formulate specific food interventions that help people with certain conditions,” according to Simo. 

She noted that Instacart is collaborating with healthcare providers and universities such as Kaiser Permanente; the Food is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University; the Stanford Cancer Institute; University of California, San Francisco’s Helen Diller Family Comprehensive Cancer Center; the University of Kentucky; the University of Buffalo; and the American Heart Association; and the Rockefeller Foundation.