Instacart Makes Inflation-Fighting Acquisition
Instacart is making it easier for CPG brands and grocers to help inflation-battered shoppers save money on groceries.
The grocery technology company has acquired Eversight, an AI-powered pricing and promotions platform for CPG brands and retailers.
Eversight, founded in 2013, offers customized tools and dynamic insights that unlock optimal promotions and pricing, which create more compelling savings opportunities for customers.
Through Eversight’s AI-powered, experimentation-based platform, CPG brands and retailers can continuously test customized pricing and promotions directly with their individual customers, at scale. This automates processes that have traditionally been highly manual and time-consuming and lets brands and retailers engage in shopper-centric optimization.
With the company’s technology for CPG brands, Eversight surfaces real-time, custom insights into the promotions that best resonate with customers and impact their buying decisions.
“Now more than ever, it’s critical that we’re delivering the right promotions to the right consumers. Eversight’s real-world, real-time insights help us find the price point or promotion that resonates with our consumers and leads to a purchase,” said Lynn Hemans, VP Consumer Intelligence & Analytics for The Hershey Company. “The capabilities that Eversight and Instacart can bring to market together have the potential to be a significant improvement in how CPG brands learn, test, and measure campaigns across the grocery industry.”
For retail partners, Eversight lets them use their physical and digital storefronts to run ongoing individualized micro price point experiments at-scale.
"As a grocer serving 112 communities, we take our responsibility to provide affordable, fresh foods seriously, especially at a time when we know our customers are aiming to stretch their food dollars. Eversight’s pricing insights position us to meet our customers' needs while creating value for our business,” said Tom Henry, Chief Data Officer & Deputy Chief Information Officer for Schnucks. “We’re excited for Eversight to join Instacart, another one of our long-standing, trusted technology partners. We’re confident that by combining their efforts, they will enhance their capabilities, which will help us better engage our customers, grow our business, and nourish people’s lives."
Bringing together Eversight’s expertise in pricing and promotions with Instacart’s scale, partnerships, and machine learning technology provides an opportunity to transform pricing strategies and promotions for Instacart’s partners. CPG brands and retailers will have access to new individualized and customized pricing tools and dynamic insights via Instacart that connect the dots between online and offline behavior to improve sales and growth, along with customers’ experiences, no matter how they choose to shop. This creates a flywheel effect in which goods are priced at the sweet spot that drives more sales and growth for CPGs and retailers – all while unlocking even better promotions and pricing for customers.
“Giving everyone access to the food they love is core to Instacart’s mission, and when it comes to grocery shopping, we know that every dollar matters. With higher inflation and the average cost of groceries up, we’re taking even more steps to make food and daily essentials more affordable,” said Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart. “By combining Eversight’s leading pricing and promotions capabilities with Instacart’s world-class teams and technology, we’re positioned to deliver even more value to our brand and retail partners, while also creating more opportunities for customers to maximize their savings both in-store and online.”
Eversight’s approach can provide nuanced insights that help retailers and CPG brands quickly achieve their objectives, while delivering a meaningful impact for customers. For example, a CPG brand partner was looking to improve an in-store promotion's performance and wanted to make it more effective, but was concerned about the risks that come with trialing new offers in-store. With the help of Eversight, the brand was able to quickly make adjustments to the promotion, resulting in 10% incremental unit sales growth. The CPG replaced more than 100 weeks of the old promotion with the new offer. In another instance, a retail partner wanted to improve their customer pricing perceptions without sacrificing their business performance. In just five weeks of price experimentation, Eversight helped identify new price points that resonated with customers across 30 categories, leading to a 6% margin lift.
Eversight’s CPG offerings will be part of the Instacart Ads product and technology suite, which provides CPG brand partners with highly-effective, measurable advertising opportunities and insights capabilities. For retailers, Eversight’s retail technology will be part of the Instacart Platform, a suite of enterprise-grade solutions that enhance and digitize grocery retail to create an omnichannel experience for customers. Specifically, Eversight will be available to retailers through Carrot Insights, Instacart’s data dashboard that tracks key performance and operational metrics for retailers to help optimize operations, provide more connected online and in-store shopping experiences, and make informed business decisions.
In addition to helping retailers and CPG brands independently surface the best pricing and promotions to their customers, Instacart offers a number of products and features designed to ensure grocery delivery and pickup are more affordable and accessible to everyone. This includes providing access to a variety of value and club retailers, fulfillment options like pickup and “No Rush” next-day delivery, payment options including EBT SNAP, as well as easy ways to discover promotions, coupons and discounts from the Instacart App Deals Tab. Instacart also recently introduced new benefits through its Instacart+ membership, including 5% cash back on pickup orders, and the new Instacart Chase card, which provides a 5% statement credit on all Instacart purchases.
