Instacart has introduced Clementine, an AI grocery shopping assistant that turns a conversation, a grocery list, or a recipe into a cart, available to most of the company's customers in the United States and Canada on the Instacart Marketplace app and website. Instacart says the assistant draws on real-time shelf inventory at the chosen store and learns from a shopper's stated preferences and past orders on the platform to help them stay on budget and surface in-stock items. Clementine is designed to handle weekly planning and lighten the mental load of deciding what to make, a task that nearly a third of adults call the hardest part of grocery shopping, according to a Harris Poll survey conducted for Instacart.
The company also said its white-label Cart Assistant for grocers is now live with Food Bazaar, Heritage Grocers Group, and Woodman's, with ALDI U.S., Harmon's, The Save Mart Companies, and Stew Leonard's to follow. Cart Assistant, which grocers can customize with their own name, tone, loyalty integration, and recipes, uses the retailer's catalog and customer data. Instacart has also formed partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google so that conversations started in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or AI Mode can be completed on Instacart.
Clementine appears as an icon at the top right on mobile and in the left-hand navigation on desktop. No pricing details for Clementine or Cart Assistant were provided.
The launch comes as Instacart, which partners with more than 2,200 retail banners in North America, says its platform has handled more than 1.6 billion lifetime orders, with a catalog topping 2 billion items and upward of 10 million inventory signals a day across nearly 100,000 stores, figures the company dates to the end of 2025. Instacart says orders placed through the assistant average more than its $115 average basket size. The survey, conducted June 2 to 4, 2026, polled 2,059 adults and has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
Chris Rogers, CEO of Instacart, said in a statement: "Every night, millions of families ask the same question: 'What's for dinner?' Not knowing the answer, let alone what to shop for, is one of the most universal human experiences, and a problem Instacart is built to solve." John Adams, Vice President and Head of Product, added: "Grocery shopping is one of the most routine things people do, and also one of the most personal."
