Whole Foods And Instacart Officially Call It Quits

In a move that’s been anticipated since 2017 when Amazon acquired Whole Foods, the grocer and delivery firm Instacart have parted ways, according to a report by CNBC.

Instacart Co-Founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta said his company is ready for the change, even though the partnership was one of the first that legitimized the startup.

“Whole Foods was one of our first partners,” he said. “But over the last few years, pretty much every major grocer in North America has chosen Instacart as their partner.”

Although Whole Foods was once Instacart’s largest partnership, it now accounts for less than 5 percent of total revenue, a source told the news outlet. When Amazon acquired the grocer, other stores looked to ways to improve their own eCommerce positions, and a lot of them chose to partner up with Instacart.

The CEO said the company now handles groceries from upwards of 20,000 stores through the United States and Canada, and it recently added alcohol delivery and advertising.

“Last year our grocery sales grew by triple digits on a percentage basis,” he said. “We are now profitable on every single delivery.”

While Mehta said the company’s deliveries were profitable, he did not say if the company itself was profitable, nor did he share costs for things like sales and marketing. He did say he is focused on the company’s growth.

Although Mehta said he expects Instacart will have an initial public offering (IPO) at some point, he’s not even paying attention to recent IPOs by Uber and Lyft, which vastly underperformed.

“I am singularly focused on Instacart,” he says. “We are heads down, thinking about the problems we want to solve and not really looking anywhere else.”

Instacart raised about $1.2 billion through private markets, raising its valuation to about $8 billion, according to the report.

The company recently dealt with some negative PR involving the tipping of its drivers, when it was accused of using tips to subsidize driver wages. Instacart responded to the criticism by changing its policy.

“The shopper community is extremely important to us,” Mehta said. “We’re proud of the progress we have made but we know we have more work to do.”