Instacart introduced Clementine, an AI grocery shopping assistant, on Sept. 9, 2026. The company said the feature is available to most U.S. and Canadian customers through its Marketplace app and website.
Clementine turns a conversation, recipe or grocery list into a personalized cart using real-time shelf availability at the customer’s chosen store. The launch gives most of Instacart’s U.S. and Canadian customers access to conversational dinner planning and cart building within its existing Marketplace.
Customers can request a week of budget-friendly lunches for children, easy high-protein dinners for two or their usual purchases. Clementine can also generate or surface recipes, apply dietary preferences, show deals and lower-cost alternatives, restock items from order history, and convert a photo or screenshot of a grocery list into cart items.
CEO Chris Rogers said Clementine learns from preferences customers share and their Instacart shopping history. He said the company has spent nearly 15 years learning how families shop and eat.
Separately, Instacart cited more than 1.6 billion lifetime orders, more than 2 billion catalog items and more than 10 million daily inventory signals as of Dec. 31, 2025. Those signals came from nearly 100,000 stores across more than 2,200 North American retail banners.
On mobile, customers can open Clementine by selecting a retailer and tapping its icon above the search bar. Desktop users can find it at the top of the left-hand navigation bar. Instacart’s help center says Clementine is not yet available to everyone.
Instacart said that, as of June 30, 2026, orders placed with Clementine contained more items than its typical basket and exceeded the company’s $115 average basket size.
The company also said its white-label Cart Assistant is live with Food Bazaar, Heritage Grocers Group and Woodman’s. ALDI U.S., Harmon’s, The Save Mart Companies and Stew Leonard’s are among the retailers set to follow. Partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google allow grocery conversations that begin in Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Mode to be completed as Instacart orders.
Founded in 2012 by Apoorva Mehta, Max Mullen and Brandon Leonardo, Instacart launched in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its business includes the consumer Marketplace, an Enterprise platform for retailers and advertising. Instacart said more than 26 million customers used its services during 2025, including about 10 million who placed at least one order in December.
Instacart announced Clementine in a press release and a post on X on Sept. 9, 2026.
