Aldi taps Instacart to power its U.S. website

The new website and app deliver better product recommendations, enhanced discovery and expanded meal planning support through shoppable recipes, Instacart said. Instacart has worked with Aldi on same-day delivery since 2017 and is now Aldi’s exclusive digital fulfillment partner.

“This was a natural next step in a relationship that’s already delivering for our customers,” Aldi COO Dave Rinaldo said in an email. “Customers get a more seamless shopping experience while Aldi remains focused on what we do best — delivering high-quality groceries at the lowest possible prices.”

Instacart has about 380 retailers on its Storefront technology platform, which includes the Storefront Pro product Aldi is using, as well as the more limited Storefront. The company launched more than 70 net-new Storefronts in 2025, more than double the 30 it did in 2024. An earlier iteration of Storefront launched in 2018 as “Powered by Instacart.” It has since been rebranded and rebuilt.

Since then, Instacart has landed both large and small grocery players as clients (either to build the full web experience or just provide delivery and pickup functionality), from Kroger, Costco and Sprouts to Tops Friendly Markets, Price Chopper and Save Mart.

“It’s meant to be a fully scalable solution for retailers to enable not just e-commerce, but also to really power their entire digital ecosystem,” said Ryan Hamburger, vp of commercial partnerships for Instacart. The tech company, he said, handles “everything from when you land on their website or open up their app, all the way through the shopping process, … all the way down through marketing and CRM, and ultimately into the fulfillment side.”

Aldi and Instacart have been working together on the Instacart marketplace since 2017. Aldi used the earlier iteration of Storefront, according to Hamburger, but around the pandemic, he said, the grocer decided to build some of that technology in-house.

“What they found is it’s very, very difficult not only to just build the experience, but also to keep pace with that innovation curve,” Hamburger said. “They can move quickly with us — more quickly than they probably could on their own. They still get to work hand-in-hand with us, helping build what is needed specifically for their brands, but at a pace that they were never going to be able to do on their own.”

Retailers give Instacart a file containing their inventory information, and the Instacart team builds an experience that looks and feels like the retailer’s brand. From start to finish, Hamburger said Instacart can build sites in weeks, or maybe a few months at most for more complex integrations.

“We knew we had to build a grocery-focused experience that was easy to implement,” Hamburger said. “Retailers, especially in the grocery space, don’t have endless IT and technical resources, and a lot of times, they are operators first.”

Because Instacart has been running an online grocery marketplace for more than a decade, the company touts its vast grocery data set to prospective retail clients. The company has completed more than 1.5 billion grocery orders.

“We had to build those catalog feeds. We had to understand what merchandising meant from a grocery standpoint. We had to build our own search tooling. We had to perfect our marketing approach. We had to optimize fulfillment, not just from a quality of service perspective, but also, we obviously had to do it in a cost-effective way,” Hamburger said. Storefront Pro “leans on all of the great insights, learnings and technology that we’ve built from Marketplace.”

Through Storefront Pro, grocers can tie in their loyalty program and have features for recipes, list-building and dietary planning. “Could they go build that on their own? Sure, but the reality is that retailers, regardless of size, especially in today’s day and age, can’t really afford to have the development team required to do that on their own,” Hamburger said.

Because Instacart has done 1.5 billion grocery orders, Hamburger said its platforms know what terms grocery shoppers are looking for, what products to replace others with and what the customer feedback is on said replacements.

“All of those very minor but important data points that we’ve collected over the years have really allowed us to optimize this in a way that, even if you’re a large retailer, you couldn’t match that,” Hamburger said.

For example, if a customer searches for a brand not available at Aldi, now, they can still search for it on Aldi’s website to see a close alternative from Aldi’s largely private-label selection.

Instacart’s system “takes all of that information and it tries to understand what the customer is actually looking for and what they are going to add to the cart, and does that in a way that’s pretty seamless behind the scenes,” Hamburger said. He added that, in tests, Instacart found that its platform led to better engagement, higher retention and higher basket size, compared to Aldi’s previous in-house website.

Meanwhile, Aldi is working to expand to more than 180 new stores in 31 states this year. Ross Cloyd, director of grocery insights at Kantar, said the new Instacart experience will make sure Aldi has the digital experience customers are looking for that can help drive traffic into those stores.

Improving the e-commerce experience is also critical for Aldi and other retailers as online grocery sales grew 32% year over year in December, according to Brick Meets Click, per Retail Dive. Instacart’s enterprise tech, Cloyd said, allows Aldi “to get there faster and quicker to where they need to be to really connect with shoppers.”