Beyond the Cart: A Year of Essential Insights

A data-driven deep dive into how the pandemic has transformed our 100-year-old grocery habits

On the evening of March 19, 2020, the first stay-at-home order in North America was issued in California, setting off a transformation of many of our 100-year-old grocery shopping habits. One of the most notable shifts proved to be America’s en masse move from in-store shopping to online grocery. Almost overnight, millions signed up for online grocery delivery to get food on the table safely during a difficult time. According to a new Instacart survey of 2,038 U.S. adults conducted recently online by The Harris Poll, nearly half of all Americans (48%) say that they ordered groceries online during the pandemic.

In a relatively short period of time, the national mood, our relationships, internal clocks, domestic roles, shopping schedules and shopping lists shifted dramatically. In this report, we examine those dynamics and what they may mean for post-pandemic life through the lens of the most universally relatable household task: grocery shopping.

How we felt: Measuring the national mood with grocery chat & emojis

In early spring 2020, consumers grappled with the unknown as the frightening reality of the pandemic set in. Instacart/Harris Poll survey data reveals that a surge of sadness, uncertainty, and anxiety washed over consumers as they planned their grocery shopping. Some survey respondents cited anxiety and fear of COVID-19 as a key motivator for shopping online:

For the first months of the pandemic, myself and members of my family were afraid of physically going into stores so we utilized the delivery of groceries.
— Male, age 24, California

I have really bad anxiety attacks while shopping for groceries …on top of that I have to take my kids with me.
— Female, age 25, Georgia

This palpable sense of uncertainty was visible in the Instacart marketplace. In March, text chat volume between Instacart customers and their Instacart shoppers increased by a whopping 50%. As customers and shoppers texted about adding last-minute items to orders, how to replace out of stock items, and more, we observed several signals for how consumers were feeling.

“Consumer fear and anxiety were very apparent in the Instacart marketplace as stay-at-home orders and product shortages set in — tellingly, the “scream” emoji experienced the largest upswing in chat usage, ballooning to four times its normal usage,” cites Laurentia Romaniuk, Instacart’s Trend Expert and Senior Product Manager. “However, feelings of fear and uncertainty were paired with and eventually gave way to an overwhelming sense of gratitude toward the essential shoppers picking and delivering their groceries. Use of the word ‘grateful’ increased across Instacart shopper chats to six times its normal usage and remains much higher than pre-pandemic averages a full twelve months later.”

Across the United States, we saw a 13% bump in the use of the phrase “thanks” in customer-shopper chat, with MT, ID, WA, OR, CO, NM, MN, MO and PA expressing thanks the most frequently. States with the lowest frequency of “thanks” are largely clustered in the Southern states, begging the question of whether that famous southern charm has buckled a bit under the weight of life in lockdown:

Life After Lockdown

• With customer-shopper chat trends showing continued elevated use of phrases and emojis that communicate gratitude, we have reason to believe that consumers will retain a deeper sense of gratitude toward Instacart shoppers — perhaps even permanently.
• We also expect to see a sustained boost in shopper-customer chat, now that customers have spent a year becoming more accustomed to the benefits of communicating directly with their shopper.

Welcome to the pandemic timewarp

As the months marched on and a “new normal” settled in, consumers eagerly embraced the nostalgia, comfort, and joy associated with the holiday season. Homebound consumers began to search online for seasonal comforts — holiday-related searches in 2020 greatly outpaced 2019 numbers:

• Searches for “Halloween candy” grew by 228% year-over-year in 2020.
• Year-over-year searches for “Christmas,” “Christmas sprinkles,” and “Christmas decor” grew by 745%, 236%, and 622%, respectively.
• Searches for “Easter candy” and “plastic Easter eggs” grew by 200% and 530% respectively year-over-year.

Interestingly, many consumers appeared to toss their calendars out the window, searching for certain holiday items weeks and even months earlier than usual. According to the Harris Poll survey data, nearly half of Americans (49%) said they had begun planning for the holidays earlier in 2020 than they had in years past. Instacart searches for comforting fall favorite “pumpkin spice” started to spike as early as March 16, 2020, a whopping 15 weeks sooner than the seasonal spikes of 2019 and 2018. Summer favorites like margarita mixers also trended earlier — 51% of 2020 searches for “margarita mix” happened by the first week of June, a nearly 10% bump from the year before. Holiday-related searches followed a similar pattern:

According to the Harris Poll survey data, of the people who indicated that they started their holiday planning earlier this past year, many say it was because it gave them something to look forward to (44%), it brought them additional joy when they needed it (35%) and that it was a stress reliever (32%).

Life After Lockdown

• Even as the world returns to normal, we anticipate that 2021 consumer interest in holiday essentials will remain high as people plan for the biggest holiday “do-overs” of their lives.
• This past year, more consumers than ever turned to Instacart for their holiday essentials, especially in the face of pandemic-driven postal delays. With retail partners like Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, the Disney Store, and Sephora all joining Instacart in 2020, we expect to see continued growing interest in same-day, non-grocery delivery, whether for gifts or simply for added convenience.

Shifting domestic norms: A senior surge and help for the household CEO

Teenager/grandparent, mom/dad, son/daughter — the profile of the online grocery consumer has changed dramatically in the past year.

Social distancing rules and COVID-19’s outsized effect on older adults have greatly affected who’s buying the household’s weekly groceries. Generational insights collected by Instacart reveal that customers over the age of 60 turned to online grocery last spring in record numbers to get their groceries delivered safely and reliably. Between the first and fourth quarter of 2020, we saw a 9% increase in the number of seniors using Instacart — the largest jump within any age group. Widespread adoption by seniors led us to develop Instacart’s Senior Support Service, a high-touch support offering designed to help customers over age 60 adopt online grocery during the pandemic. To date, nearly 300,000 seniors have learned how to use Instacart with the help of Instacart’s dedicated senior support specialists.

Additionally, younger generations and other household members also stepped in to share the domestic load. According to the Harris Poll survey data, nearly 3 in 4 Americans who were the primary grocery shopper for their household before the COVID-19 pandemic (74%) report that someone in their household has taken on additional grocery shopping responsibilities since the start of the pandemic. In general, Gen Z (ages 18–24) and Millennials (ages 25–40) are even more likely than Gen X (ages 41–56) and Boomers (ages 57–75) to say someone in their household has taken on additional grocery shopping responsibilities (89% and 85% vs. 71% and 62%). “I didn’t feel comfortable exposing myself when I was staying with my elderly grandparents,” one 22 year-old female survey respondent said.

We can see this sentiment loud and clear in text chats between Instacart customers and shoppers — in the spring, customer mentions of different family members surged:

As we move past the pandemic, our insights point to consumers’ continued use of Instacart in part because of the time we give them back to enjoy the things they love — hopefully soon with the people they love, and maybe even for the people they love.

The biggest change that I hope to continue is shopping for my elderly parents as well as for myself… I have enjoyed being able to help them and I think that is something that should continue.
— Female, age 50, Florida

Life After Lockdown

• The Instacart customer used to be primarily heads of households, now it’s everyone. Post-pandemic, we expect the profile of the online grocery delivery customer to continue expanding to younger and older customers, many of whom spent the last year discovering the convenience and ease of online grocery delivery.
• We anticipate that seniors, now that they’ve crossed the digital shopping divide out of necessity, will continue to take advantage of the convenience of Instacart as an easy & accessible way to augment in-store visits. Even today as the world slowly starts to open up and more seniors are eligible for vaccines, we continue to see a steady rise in seniors coming online via our Senior Support Service, which has been growing by about 1,000 senior customers daily.
• We also expect to see expanded use cases for Instacart now that the pandemic has opened consumers’ eyes to new applications of online grocery delivery, like helping loved ones with grocery shopping from a distance, sending gifts to friends and family, keeping a dorm room stocked with study snacks, or involving older children in meal planning.

When we shop: Mid-week multitasking and the end of the Sunday shop?

Instacart data indicates that the weekly 90-minute Sunday shop may be loosening its grip on our weekend routines. After an upheaval in our daily routines and (for some) a shift toward more flexible work arrangements, customers have been placing a larger share of their orders earlier in the day and on weekdays, a trend that has continued into 2021.

• The share of orders placed on weekdays grew by 8% platform-wide last year.
• Instacart orders placed during local working hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m.) increased by 32% in 2020.

Early 2021 analysis shows us that while some consumers have returned to their weekend ordering habits, a meaningful portion of others are holding onto their new midweek routine. Many Harris Poll survey respondents cited the convenience of grocery platforms as a key motivator to continue.

“Online grocery fits seamlessly into the more flexible schedules that the world is moving toward after a collective awakening to the benefits of remote work,” said Laurentia Romaniuk. “Given the trends we’re seeing, we expect many consumers to stick with their new mid-week grocery delivery routines, now that they’ve experienced the flexibility that online platforms like Instacart give them to build and maintain shopping lists throughout the week and easily place an order in between meetings and personal time, to be delivered in as fast as two hours.”

Life After Lockdown

• As many businesses formalize new, more flexible remote work policies, we expect the shift to a more even spread of ordering throughout the week and earlier in the day to continue. 2021 order data already supports this trend, and we look forward to continuing to track it as the pandemic subsides.

What we are (and aren’t) buying: The pandemic personas we embraced

As the leading online grocery platform in North America, Instacart has a unique view of the aisles and product categories that customers gravitated towards while they stayed home. As the months dragged on, we observed four unmissable customer buying personas emerge:

1. Locked Down & Lovelorn

At the start of the pandemic, we observed a notable plunge across the sexual and reproductive health categories — sales for many sexual-health related items including pregnancy and ovulation tests, condoms, and others took a dip in the spring as consumers’ lives were thrown into limbo and social distancing rules became the norm.

According to the Harris Poll data, a whopping 57% percent of surveyed Americans say that they turned their attention away from dating or relationships at one point during the pandemic, and used the time to focus on themselves, concentrating on their own mental and physical well-being. While the love lives of Americans took a hit this year, our data indicates that consumers may have funneled their passions into other pursuits, embracing at-home baking and outdoor hobbies like grilling and birding.

2. Springtime Stockpilers

These consumers were glued to the news and bought household essentials like toilet paper, hand sanitizers, Lysol, PineSol, Clorox, and batteries to keep their germ-busting survival stores stocked and ready for anything.

3. Modern Day Homesteaders

These trend-setting homebodies dove deep into the baking and culinary categories, searching for baking supplies, flour, and yeast to feed their new sourdough starters and banana bread. When they weren’t in the kitchen, these homesteaders bought essentials like charcoal and grill fuels to outfit their own little slice of the outdoors — their backyards. Other consumers leaned into new lockdown-friendly hobbies — first-time birders powered a 27% year-over-year increase in searches for “bird food” as they filled their new feeders.

Early in the pandemic, we saw a massive interest in the baking category, but as time wore on the carbo-load may have worn off (or stayed on in the form of “the quarantine 15”). When asked what foods they never want to eat again following the pandemic, sourdough bread and sweet treats won the day:

Bread, I’ve made so much of it out of boredom and I’m
very sick of it.
— Female, Age 27, Indiana

Sourdough bread — although delicious and
healthy I’ve had enough of it.
— Male, Age 53, Rhode Island

Too many baked goods.
— Female, Age 62, Pennsylvania

“While home baking, outdoor grilling, and backyard birding probably won’t replace restaurants and traveling as the world continues to open up, many hobbyists have spent their time at home perfecting new skills that they’ll keep with them for the rest of their lives. We won’t be surprised to see sustained interest in baking, home cooking and outdoor-related purchases post-pandemic.” — Laurentia Romaniuk, Instacart’s Trends Expert

4. Locked-Down Lushes

Some buyers distilled their shopping lists down to a different aisle — the alcohol aisle. Instacart offers alcohol delivery and pickup across 25 states plus Washington, D.C. in partnership with more than 200 retail partners, including ALDI, Sam’s Club, BJs, Sprouts, The Fresh Market, BevMo!, and Total Wine & More, among others.

Presumably as an attempt to relieve stress and anxiety, consumers looked for quick, easy ways to wind down during the pandemic. Canned or pre-mixed cocktail sales grew by 127%, and brew-obsessed buyers fueled the rapid rise of specialty beers and spiked seltzers as well, with sales in the categories growing by 96% and 131% respectively this year. In the traditional spirits category, the hard liquor of choice proved to be gin, which grew by 21% year-over-year.

As we’ve lived through the pandemic, our data indicates that most consumers embodied more than one persona — they baked, boozed, and stockpiled essentials all at once as they searched for diversion, comfort or entertainment. Whatever personas consumers adopted, what’s clear is that food and grocery trends gave buyers a much needed sense of community in dark times. According to the Harris Poll data, 60% of Americans indicated that participating in pandemic food and buying trends gave them a sense of “we’re all in this together.”

Life After Lockdown

• Stockpiles may be here to stay. While cleaning products are now much more widely available than they were early on in the pandemic, Harris Poll survey data suggests that consumers will keep topping up their stockpile of cleaning supplies and household essentials well into the future. Keeping hand sanitizers, hand soap, or disinfectant wipes on hand (51%) tops the list of grocery habits adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic that Americans plan to keep for the long term, followed by ensuring they never run out of home essentials like batteries, toilet paper, and paper towels (39%). As one 29-year-old man from California shared, “[I plan to] keep a healthy tab on necessities as I’m not ever sure when the next epidemic/catastrophe is.”
• Pantry prep is another behavior that may stick with us. According to Harris Poll data, many Americans say how to stock the pantry and/or refrigerator (29%), how to meal plan/prep (25%), how to enjoy leftovers (31%), how to store leftovers (22%) are amongst the food lessons learned in the past year that will impact how they shop and cook in the future.
• After an indulgent year, we won’t be surprised to see a post pandemic healthy eating surge. According to Harris Poll data, 36% of Americans say how to eat more healthfully is a food lesson they’ve learned in the past year that will impact how they shop and cook.
• Budgets may remain tight for many Americans post-pandemic, with 36% of Harris Poll survey respondents saying that “how to save money on groceries” is among the food lessons they’ve learned in the past year. We also saw consumers’ elevated interest in promotions and coupons from brands play out on the Instacart platform in 2020. Instacart’s digital coupon platform, one of the largest in the world, saved customers $56 million in 2020. Moving forward, Instacart will continue to bring even more new savings into the digital aisles for budget-conscious consumers.

Post pandemic: The future of grocery is fast

While consumer shopping habits will continue to evolve as the world inches closer to “normal,” living through more than a year of distanced living, new habits and cultural norms have forever changed how many of us shop. Instacart went from a convenience to a lifeline and has now become a fixture in people’s lives.

According to the Harris Poll data of those who bought groceries online during the pandemic, 77% indicated they are likely to continue doing so in the future.

Importantly, the past year has also given millions of consumers a taste for the speed and convenience of online grocery, and Instacart data reveals that consumers are hungry for more. Gone are the days of two-day delivery; customers now expect to get their groceries in as fast as two hours — if not much faster.

In an Instacart experiment, when presented with a slate of delivery options including 2-hour or less delivery, 5-hour delivery, and other scheduled options throughout the day, an overwhelming 85% of customers opt for delivery in 2 hours or less. Further, when we look at smaller grocery orders of 15 items or fewer, customers have an even greater expectation to get their deliveries ASAP, and Instacart is well-positioned to meet or even exceed those expectations. In 2020, 95% of small orders were delivered in under 2 hours and 50% of them were delivered in under 1 hour.

As we begin turning the corner past the pandemic, Instacart is laser focused on translating the lessons of the pandemic into long-term value for consumers. Whether they opt for 2-hours or under delivery, curbside pickup, or periodic trips to the store, the future of online grocery post-pandemic will be about swiftly adapting to meet consumers’ expectations and deepening the role we play in their lives in a world that, after a year of necessity, is forever tuned to online delivery.

Methodology:

This survey was conducted online within the United States by The Harris Poll on behalf of Instacart from February 25 — March 1, 2021 among 2,038 U.S. adults ages 18 and older. This online survey is not based on a probability sample and therefore no estimate of theoretical sampling error can be calculated. For complete survey methodology, including weighting variables and subgroup sample sizes, please contact press@instacart.com.

Instacart analyzed anonymized, aggregated chat, search and purchase activity across our marketplace to understand what products and categories are trending. For year-over-year measurements, Instacart compared searches and sales from January 1, 2019 — December 31, 2019 to activity from January 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020. For indexed measurements, Instacart benchmarked search and sales volume relative to the first week of 2020. All year-over-year and indexed data is normalized to account for customer growth.