The lines between Food & Grocery delivery continue to blur

Beginning in 2021, and on the Grocery delivery side, both Instacart and Gopuff expanded their delivery services by offering delivery of fresh meals. Instacart with its new ‘Ready Meals’ service which allows customers to order prepared foods you expect to see in grocers' Deli areas; Gopuff by offering ready-to-eat “Gopuff Kitchen" items made using Gopuff’s own recipes and ingredients from local partners.

In the last year, DoorDash has surpassed UberEats in attracting new digital visitors, growing 35% Y/Y and 6% Q/Q. Grubhub struggled to keep pace as well; yet that seems to be changing in Q3 ‘22 due to its new partnership with Amazon Prime. While Instacart still has a clear dominance in the Grocery Delivery segment, it is slowly falling behind DoorDash for prepared foods; its number of total digital unique visitors may have grown at a very healthy 25% Y/Y and 4% Q/Q, but that is still slower than DoorDash and accounts for half of DoorDash’s consumer base.

DoorDash’s use of influencers sets it apart…

Comparing the social media presence* of DoorDash and Instacart, seven of the top ten posts belong to DoorDash. This was despite Instacart posting 56% more content than DoorDash. Both brands had partnerships with influencers within their top posts, but DoorDash used influencers with an audience more aligned with their own. In the examples below, we can see Bubba Wallace engagers have much more in common with Door Dash (affinity score: 3,454)** than Lizzo engagers do with Instacart (affinity score: 32).

... while Chase and Mastercard get a leg up

The growing Food/Groceries delivery space has caught the attention of top credit card issuers which regularly offer deals to cardholders to use their cards on these platforms. But Chase, in partnership with Mastercard, has upped the ante by announcing the rollout of co-branded cards with Instacart and DoorDash, both clear leaders in their respective segment. The co-branded credit card via the partnership between Instacart, Chase and Mastercard is already in market and offers 5% cashback on purchases made on Instacart as well as other rewards and perks for using it off platform. The DoorDash co-branded card is expected to offer rewards and perks on and off platform as well. Both these partnerships not only incentivize the overall growth of this market but give Chase and Mastercard a leg up within this space.

* Here social media is restricted to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.
** Affinity scores measure how much more likely the audience of Instacart of DoorDash would engage with an influencer’s page, compared to how likely an average user on Facebook, Twitter & Instagram would engage with that same page.
Data sources: Comscore Mobile Metrix, Jul 2021 – Sep 2022, U.S.
Comscore powered by Shareablee, Jan 2022 to Sep 2022, U.S.