Instacart Bringing Updated Smart Carts to Grocery Stores, Helping Them Compete with Whole Foods and Amazon Stores

Instacart (San Francisco) is launching a bundle of new technologies to help grocers unify online shopping with in-store experiences, including a revamped smart cart.

The new model of the Caper Cart is equipped with scales, sensors, touchscreens and computer vision, enabling customers to navigate the store and check themselves out without manually scanning items.

The updated Caper Cart has a slimmer profile than the previous version and has 65% more capacity, Instacart says. It also features stacked charging, allowing grocers to charge batches of carts at once and eliminating the need to charge carts individually or swap out batteries.

Other new tech solutions from Instacart include a scan-and-pay option that allows shoppers to check out from their mobile phones, as well as “Out of Stock Insights,” which help retailers provide automatic alerts to associates when items are running low or out of stock.

Instacart calls the collective tech bundle its “Connected Stores” platform, which will make its debut at the Bristol Farms store in Irvine, Calif. The company says other grocers in the U.S. and Canada – including Wakefern Food Corp., Schnucks and Joseph’s Classic Market – have piloted certain technologies and will soon be deploying elements of Connected Stores.

The introduction of Connected Stores comes as Amazon ramps up its rollout of friction-reducing tech for its Whole Foods, Amazon Fresh and Amazon Go stores.

In July, the company announced new features were added to its Dash Cart, which was introduced to Amazon Go stores in 2020. The carts are now available in Amazon Fresh stores across the country, and Whole Foods is just beginning to roll them out.