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Following a 15-month pilot with more than 50 brands, any advertiser on Instacart can add in-store smart cart ads to their campaigns starting in April, the company announced on March 25.
Instacart’s AI-powered Caper Carts are currently in about a dozen retail chains across 60 cities in the U.S., Austria, and Australia, including Aldi, Kroger, Schnucks, and Wakefern. It’s part of a growing trend toward tech-enabled in-store retail media, a category that’s expected to top $1 billion in ad spend by 2028, according to Emarketer.
The carts are equipped with digital screens and can sense where a shopper is in the store, prompting ads for bone broth when they’re in the soup aisle, for example. They’re also plugged into the store’s inventory data, so they only advertise in-stock items.
Shoppable display ads, one ad format available on Instacart’s marketplace, will now automatically extend onto the Caper Carts, explained Instacart vice president of ads product, Ali Miller.
“We’re excited to start really scaling this now that we feel like we’ve proven the basics,” Miller said.
Brands including Diana’s Bananas, Kettle & Fire, Talking Rain Beverage Company, and Mondelēz participated in the pilot. Instacart declined to share details on the financial agreements required to deploy the smart carts at retail stores. The company also declined to share exactly how many carts are currently in operation, but said that the number is growing.
“Instacart Ads is one of our highest-performing platforms,” Niccolo Gloazzo, senior director of media and omnichannel at Kettle & Fire, said in a statement. “Because of their easy-to-use ad buying interface, we’ve been able to deploy impactful campaigns that meet our business objectives.”
Also announced today, midwest grocery chain Hy-Vee said that the company is using Instacart’s retail media adtech offering, Carrot Ads, to power its ad network. The deal will give advertisers the option to buy ads either through Instacart or directly from the retailer through Hy-Vee’s RedMedia, with Carrot Ads powering the back end in either case.
Carrot Ads currently powers around 220 retail media networks in addition to Hy-Vee, including Thrive Market, Woodman’s, Price Chopper, and Coborn’s.
“Retail media is a critical driver of the grocery ecosystem, and since launching Hy-Vee RedMedia, we’ve been committed to strengthening our capabilities in this area,” Kathryn Mazza, president of Hy-Vee RedMedia and chief marketing officer of Hy-Vee, Inc., said in a statement. “Our partnership with Instacart through their Carrot Ads solution exemplifies how we’re continuing to enhance our offerings by expanding the value we bring to advertisers.”
Both announcements reflect Instacart’s efforts to become a one-stop retail media shop for advertisers, Instacart’s Miller said, especially as the landscape gets more complex and crowded.
“We hear from brands large and small, from agencies, from API partners—everyone working in retail media right now—that it’s getting very difficult to manage so many individual retail media networks,” Miller said. “[Our goal is to make] set up, management, and performance really easy to understand and easy to extend all of these surfaces without needing to set it up individually.”
Instacart acquired Caper AI, the maker of the tech-enabled smart carts, for $350 million in 2021. It started testing ads on the carts in January 2024, and will continue to test additional ad formats, like gamified “Quests” and sponsored listing ads, throughout the rest of 2025, the company said.
