Instacart introduced Clementine, an AI grocery assistant now available to most customers in the U.S. and Canada on its Marketplace. A plain-language message — “a week of budget-friendly kid lunches,” “high-protein easy dinners for two,” “order my usuals” — returns a ready-to-buy cart, filtered against what the customer’s chosen store has on the shelf at that moment. It will also read a photo of a handwritten list and turn it into one. Dietary preferences are set once in an expanded preference center and applied across the experience; recipes are either generated or pulled from publishers Instacart has deals with.
The claim underneath all of it is inventory data. Instacart counts more than 1.6 billion lifetime orders, a catalog of more than 2 billion items and more than 10 million daily inventory signals from nearly 100,000 stores across more than 2,200 retail banners. On performance the company says customers begin with restocking and move on to recipe discovery, and that Clementine orders carry more items than its typical basket, which it puts at $115 as of June 30, 2026. A Harris Poll it commissioned over three days in June 2026, covering 2,059 U.S. adults, found more than 80% saying the decision about dinner causes stress and more than three in five interested in an AI assistant that could help with it.
The same grocery intelligence runs under other names. Cart Assistant is the white-label version, built for grocers who want the assistant on their own site and app, drawing on their catalog and their customer data, with a name, tone and loyalty integration they choose. Food Bazaar, Heritage Grocers Group and Woodman’s are live; ALDI U.S., Harmon’s, The Save Mart Companies and Stew Leonard’s are listed as following. Instacart has also struck deals with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, so a grocery conversation that starts in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or AI Mode in Google Search can finish as an Instacart order from the shopper’s preferred retailer.
Read more at Instacart.