Instacart’s Clementine tackles dinner decision fatigue with AI
Instacart is unveiling a new conversational AI to help solve the nightly meal-planning grind for millions of shoppers.
The grocery delivery giant’s new synthetic shopping partner, Clementine, gives customers across the U.S. and Canada an AI assistant embedded directly in the Instacart Marketplace app and website. The tool converts a text message, a recipe or a scribbled grocery list into a cart ready for checkout, per real-time shelf availability at a customer’s selected store.
Instacart said the tool is built on 1.6 billion lifetime orders, a catalog exceeding 2 billion items and more than 10 million daily inventory signals pulled from close to 100,000 stores spanning over 2,200 retail banners.
“Every night, millions of families ask the same question: ‘What’s for dinner?’ Not knowing the answer, let alone what to shop for, is one of the most universal human experiences, and a problem Instacart is built to solve,” Instacart CEO Chris Rogers said.
Shoppers can prompt Clementine with open-ended requests like “high-protein easy dinners for two” or “order my usuals,” and the assistant will build a cart accordingly. It also generates original recipes, pulls curated options from outside publishers and applies dietary preferences such as gluten-free or nut-free across a household’s entire shopping experience once those settings are saved.
Other functions include surfacing deals and cheaper substitutes, rebuilding pantry staples from past order history, assembling lists for events and converting a photograph or screenshot of a shopping list into an editable cart.
“We’ve spent nearly 15 years learning how families shop and eat, and Clementine puts that knowledge to work,” Rogers added. “It learns from the preferences you share and the way you’ve shopped on Instacart. It can help you stay on budget and surface what's actually in stock at your chosen store, handling enough of the weekly planning that the mental load actually feels lighter.”
Clementine sits alongside Cart Assistant, Instacart’s version of the same technology built for grocers who want a branded AI shopping tool on their own sites and apps. Retailers using Cart Assistant can customize its name, tone, loyalty program integration and recipe content while pulling from their own catalog and customer data. Food Bazaar, Heritage Grocers Group and Woodman’s have already gone live with the enterprise tool, and Harmons, The Save Mart Companies and Stew Leonard’s are expected to follow.
Instacart has also struck partnerships with Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, allowing grocery-related conversations that begin on Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI Mode to carry over into a completed Instacart order for delivery or pickup.
“What we built with Clementine is a system that understands both of those things – not just what you need, but how you eat, what you love and what’s on the shelves at your store right now,” said John Adams, VP and head of product at Instacart. “The more you use it, the more it feels like a natural part of how your household shops, becoming something you reach for week after week.”
Customers can access Clementine by opening the Instacart app or website, selecting a retailer and tapping the Clementine icon near the search bar on mobile or in the left-hand navigation on desktop.
This article was first published by Canadian Grocer's sister publication, Progressive Grocer.
