How Instacart is Providing Food Accessibility and Affordability

By Irene Yeh

In June, Food as Medicine 2025 kicked off their fifth annual conference in Chicago. A healthy diet consisting of a wide variety of nutritious foods is the foundation for good health. But for food deserts and impoverished neighborhoods, food accessibility and affordability are not available for residents. To combat these issues, Instacart launched Instacart Health, a program that provides financial support, nutritional knowledge, and delivery services for healthy groceries. Partnered with 1,800 grocery stores (totaling 100,000 grocery locations across the country), Instacart has delivery coverage to 98% of US households.

“When we think about a national program, we have the capability to get fresh foods into every household,” said Dwight Schultheis, director of health at Instacart, during a presentation. “When we think about scaling food-as-medicine programs, it really boils down to two key things: accessibility—including physical and financial access—and approachability.”

Instacart Health and Its Three Areas of Focus

Instacart Health started three years ago with a focus on three areas: increasing nutrition security, making informed healthy choices easier, and combining these two to bring food as medicine and nutrition interventions online. The program has a consumer-first mindset, prioritizing affordability and accessibility. The program’s Health Wallet feature allows multiple payment methods—including SNAP and FSA—to help the individual find affordable items.

“One cool thing about SNAP that we launched recently was an eligibility screener that any user can use, but a lot of our healthcare partners are doing it [via] a 60-second eligibility test, and if you’re eligible, it directs you to local resources to sign up for SNAP,” Schultheis mentioned.

Instacart Health also has a feature called Fresh Funds, a customizable credit system that enables healthcare organizations to create medically tailored grocery plans, from the amounts and frequency of stipends to determining what items are eligible. There are plans that also focus on diet-related chronic disease, maternal health, and more. Fresh Funds also collects data to tie consumption with clinical outcomes, which provides evidence needed to scale the programs.

Additionally, with their SmartShop feature, they enable customizable preferences for special dietary restrictions and/or requirements, such as low calorie, low sodium, high fiber, and so on. An example of this is when Instacart Health created an “inspiration page” in partnership with the American Diabetes Association. This inspiration page was put together using ADA expertise and their top recipes, making the ingredients shoppable and putting forth recommended food groups, as well as providing additional information for diabetic, pre-diabetic, obese, or health-conscious patients.

“So, when a doctor might recommend low sugar or low carb foods, making those choices while shopping at the store can be very difficult,” explains Schultheis. “What we’re trying to do is continue to make more food and nutrition information searchable and accessible.”

These programs have not only contributed to creating better food accessibility and affordability, but they have also significantly impacted the economy of local areas by using local stores. “It’s not just about national. It’s also about local.”

Working With Healthcare Providers

“We’re really working closely with Medicaid, Medicare…and a lot of different tech-enabled healthcare providers to create the scale and efficiency and allow these programs to be measurable,” said Schultheis.

For example, Molina Healthcare of Michigan, a Medicaid Managed Care Organization (MCO), provides 600 pregnant mothers with a $100 monthly stipend and a secure membership to increase healthy food access. The clinical measurement is around full-term births and healthy baby birth weights. Schultheis hopes that, after 18 months, there will be enough data gathered that can be published and contribute to securing funding for more programs.

The Partnership for Healthy America showed that participants prefer the “dignity of choice shopping” with a stipend program, as well as high engagement and intention to sustain these behaviors. “Generally, we found that people want to consume more of these healthy foods, but they’re not able to, especially when they’re in food deserts.”

In other words, people from impoverished and underserved areas want healthy foods and feel empowered enough to take control of their health through food nutrition. These programs provide them with opportunities to do so.

Future Projects and Research

With the recent cuts to Medicaid and Medicare and other research funds, Schultheis emphasized the need to be cost-effective. “It has to be medically tailored, and it has to be member-centric.”

He also expressed enthusiasm for how the programs will impact future research. “Once these programs get to the point where we can produce research… we can then parse up who those individuals are, take them back to the plan, and show an actual member population from the plan and results.” He knows that collecting the data and formulating plans are much more compelling for a health plan to see instead of something that is published that does not include members.