Being an Instacart shopper helps one chef find extra income — and culinary inspiration

Whether it’s a soufflé or a burger, many chefs dream of making the perfect dish. (And many people dream of eating one.) Take Adrian, a North Hollywood chef on a quest to create the perfect flauta, a small rolled flour and meat-filled dish, with strong roots in Adrian’s family.

“You can’t find food like back home!” he says, hailing from El Paso, Texas, just across the border from Juarez, Mexico. But the quest goes to a deeper level: “I want to do something for my people.”

Now he’s in the mad scientist phase, experimenting with recipes to wow even the most ardent flauta critic. Someday he hopes to have his own food truck, but right now his research is on the salsa — one that should be muy picante, and works in combination with the dough, cheese, toppings and sour cream.

“It’s the mix that makes it,” he says.

So working with Instacart as a Personal Shopper has provided a side-benefit Adrian didn’t expect: he sees different shopping lists every day. Now he can understand how other people think about their own recipes. “It’s opened my eyes a lot,” he says. Each day that he works picking out items for customers, Adrian is also re-thinking his own cooking. He was French trained — in other words, he uses a lot of butter — but now can see how a vegan or a seafood fan approaches a recipe. “All that stuff that was a taboo for us,” he says.

That perspective has helped Adrian’s recipe brainstorming — and his waistline. He spends a lot of time shopping at Whole Foods. Seeing healthy alternatives to more industrial food products has gone a long way to helping Adrian reshape his own diet. “I knew it was bad,” he says. “But I didn’t know it was this bad.” Over the last year Adrian says he’s lost about 80 pounds.

Before working with Instacart, Adrian worked as a cook, executive chef and food service director. But those jobs left him working twenty-four-seven and exhausted every night he’d get home. “I wouldn’t see the sun.” He also did research and development at a juice company. But again, Adrian didn’t find the work fulfilling.

When Adrian first heard of Instacart, he and his family had their doubts — but a friend in the food service industry vouched for the service so Adrian gave it a shot. He has been loving it ever since. “Instacart has given me a lot of liberty and time that I never had,” he says. “The time management is the best part of it.”

Hopefully that means we’ll soon have that perfect flauta.

Learn more about becoming a shopper at Instacart.