Instacart’s Frantic Dash From Grocery App to Essential Service
Holly Ervin shops for Instacart in the Sacramento area. While she has some items memorized, she often has to search for others. “What they show us in the app is sometimes outdated, so you really have to look.” She’s saving to start a mobile dog-grooming business.
Photo Illustration by 731. Photographs by Justin Sariñana for Bloomberg BusinessweekFor the first-ever Zoom call with all 1,200 of his full-time employees, Instacart Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer Apoorva Mehta had an inspiring speech ready to go. It was all about coming together, noble missions, wartime footings, and Instacart’s sudden ascension from mere grocery delivery app to essential service for the human species. Then the fire alarm went off.
This was in late March, a couple of days after Californians had been ordered to shelter in place, and Mehta’s San Francisco landlord hadn’t thought to reschedule his apartment building’s routine safety test. The alarm, screeching over the Instacart team’s home-office computer speakers, was at just the right pitch to set off dogs, which could now be heard barking frantically via the microphones of employees who’d neglected to mute. Mehta was stuck. “It wasn’t one of those all-hands where I could have put myself on mute,” he says. “I was presenting.”