Instacart and DoorDash just posted big quarterly numbers. That’s good for them, but bad for grocers.
Here’s the problem nobody puts in the board deck: every order routed through a marketplace app, white-labeled or not, is an order where the grocer never saw the search, never touched the loyalty data, never got a cut of the ad revenue. As digital penetration climbs, the ownership of the customer quietly disappears underneath it.
Grocers can still turn this around, but not by trying to out-market Instacart. The move is to make their own tools the default habit, so a shopper opens them before they even think about a competitor’s. Whoever gets that first click keeps the margin and the customer.
Everyone else is just fulfilling someone else’s sale.
This video is a summary of The Marketplace Trap, a 10-part series on why grocers are handing customer ownership and profit margins to platforms, and what they can do to take it back.
The full series:
