Let’s imagine a scenario: You’re a grocer. You’ve spent years modernizing your operation—adding digital touchpoints, upgrading your grocery ecommerce platform, and investing in supermarket ecommerce solutions like Wynshop so you can finally stop relying on Instacart (which treats your customers like a captive audience at a mall kiosk). You’ve tasted freedom. Sweet, white-label freedom.
And then—bam!—Instacart (Nasdaq:CART) buys Wynshop.
Wait, what?
That’s right. The company you were using to escape Instacart… is now owned by Instacart. This is like moving out of your overbearing parents' house only to discover your landlord is your mom. And she’s now charging you for the Wi-Fi.
The Trojan horse in the produce aisle
At first glance, this looks like a strategic, synergistic, oh-so-innovative acquisition. Instacart, long obsessed with becoming more than just a grocery delivery app, now owns a platform that once positioned itself as the alternative to Instacart. Actually, make that three… Hello Unata and Rosie.app! How’s that for vertical integration?
But let’s not kid ourselves. Despite Instacart’s promises, this buy isn’t about enabling grocers. It’s about enabling ads. Instacart is no longer a grocery logistics company. It's a media company. Don’t believe me? Listen to Instacart’s earnings calls. Count how many times they say “advertising.” (Hint: it’s more than “groceries,” “fulfillment,” or “delivery.”)
Still skeptical? Google "Instacart form sec filing S1" and CTRL-F your way to enlightenment.
Their key executive leadership comes from Facebook Ads and ad-related roles. They’ve built a platform—Instacart Ads and Carrot Ads—specifically to monetize your shoppers. Your data—yes, your first-party data—is fueling their ad empire. It’s like giving someone your customer loyalty list and watching them hand it over to your competitor with a smile.
It’s not surprising, though. eMarketer estimates that US Retail Media Ad spend will reach over $60B this year, en route to becoming a $100B market by 2028.
An incentive mismatch
If your platform makes money when you do, that’s alignment. If your platform makes money selling access to your customers to the highest bidder—that’s a hostage situation. The economic incentives of Instacart and grocers are inherently misaligned:
Grocers want to build loyalty, reduce costs, and control margins.
Instacart wants to maximize engagement, drive ad clicks, and monetize data.
Instacart’s goals are clear: more eyeballs, more ad clicks, more brands throwing money into the carrot-shaped trough. Whether those eyeballs land on your store or someone else’s doesn’t matter. Because in this game, you are not the customer. You’re the inventory.
The two incentives cannot coexist sustainably. Any grocer running on a platform whose primary business is selling ads will have to compete for customer attention with brands that pay for that attention. Which means they, too, will have to pay for attention. And then, the more successful a grocer is on the platform, the more valuable its customer data becomes—to Instacart.
We used to say “if you are not paying for the product, you are the product.” And now even when you are paying for it, you are still the product.
The aggregation gap
Welcome to Aggregation Theory 101, brought to you by Professor Ben Thompson. The class is free, but Instacart will advertise to you during the lecture, carrots included for your pleasure.
The Instacart-Wynshop dynamic is a textbook case of Aggregation Theory in action. Platforms that aggregate consumer demand hold disproportionate power over suppliers—in this case, grocers. As consumers congregate on Instacart’s app to buy groceries online, grocers are disincentivized from investing in independent digital experiences. Over time, this concentrates both traffic and data within the platform.
This is the same playbook we’ve seen from platforms in every industry: be indispensable, then become extractive. We saw it with Google, Meta and a handful of other technology companies that became ubiquitous in our personal and professional lives. Now it’s happening in the grocery industry, which is poised to be the next big player in ecommerce.
And remember when Instacart's plan leaked, revealing that they’re considering opening as many as 50 robot-powered fulfillment centers across the US? Grocers do.
That arrangement works well for the business doing the aggregating, but it comes at a pretty significant cost to everyone else.
Loyalty hemorrhage
Spending millions building your brand, earning your customers’ trust, fine-tuning your experience—and then handing it all over to a third-party platform so they can slap their logo on the checkout button and take the credit isn’t a win for any company.
Customers are most loyal to the options that are convenient and comfortable to them. Comfort builds routine and routine builds trust. Once they’re settled in a routine, they want to stick with it. This is reinforced clearly by a survey from Barclay’s, which identified that 37% of your shoppers would stick to Instacart even after your departure.
“Oh look,” says the aggregator, “you brought the relationship, the inventory, the labor, the customer… we brought the widget that says ‘Buy Now.’ So we’ll be taking the data, the loyalty, and, oh yeah, 15%.”
And we call this a partnership.
At some point, you’ve got to stop asking, “How do we work better with the platform?” and start asking, “Why does the platform own our customers’ loyalty when we did the work?”
Run payments through Instacart → Instascale → Lower fees!
Any self‑respecting aggregator doesn’t stop at siphoning your traffic and data; it wants the cash register too. On the PowerPoint slide it looks brilliant. Instacart will handle payment processing for your customers, and they’ll give you a break on payment processing fees! Roll in an in‑house wallet, lash it to that shiny “loyalty” program, and boom: perfection. It’s the icing on the cake—except the cake is your margin and the icing is their lock‑in.
Is the short-term savings really worth lifetime dependency on the Instacart platform? Once your customers’ credit cards, loyalty points, and shopping history all live inside Instacart’s walled garden, guess who can never, ever leave without a messy custody battle over the kids?
Exit, stage left: Wynshop leadership bolts
Leadership departures after strategic acquisition aren’t always red flags. It’s common in those scenarios that executive leadership leaves in short phases for a quick integration. Instacart's founder left after the IPO—I'm sure it's just a coincidence, right?
But when senior leadership—the people who refined Wynshop’s vision around grocer autonomy—leaves, who’s going to steer the ship? Instacart’s ad-focused executives.
It should come as no surprise that their vision for the company will change direction. It's like replacing your farmers with billboard salesmen and wondering why your produce is suddenly shrink-wrapped in slogans.
Control, costs, and creeping centralization
Let’s talk about what this acquisition really means for grocers' businesses: A significant loss of control.
Customer Experience? Owned by someone else. Data Sovereignty? Shared “with trusted third parties” Pricing and Promotions? Subject to marketplace rules you didn’t write. Fulfillment? Purchasing decisions are driven more by algorithmic preferences than customer loyalty. Total Cost of Ownership? Rising, opaque, and unpredictable. Long-term Brand Equity? You’re trading short-term convenience and profit for future loyalty.
In a platform-driven world, ownership of the customer relationship will define which grocers thrive, and which become suppliers to an algorithmic middleman.
Thankfully, some retailers saw it coming. Companies like Walmart, Sam’s Club, and H-E-B are creating independent digital experiences and investing in their own ecommerce infrastructure. And that means creating solutions that work for them, not just aggregators.
So what’s the next move for grocers looking to succeed in the era of online grocery delivery?
Take back control of your grocery ecommerce platform. Because once the checkout lane closes, you might not get another shot.