141.7 million Americans bought groceries online at least once in 2022, accounting for an estimated $135 billion in sales, according to CapitalOne Research. And while online grocery shopping exploded during the pandemic, growth is still expected to top 20% annually through 2025.
Increasingly, brands that shoppers used to only find at their local grocery stores are innovating to meet digital customers where they are.
At Adweek’s Retail Media Summit this week, General Mills senior customer manager Baza Futrell and Instacart senior director of food brand partnerships Morgan O’Hara talked about how their partnership came together.
“They wanted to get on the train early and be a first-mover,” O’Hara said of General Mills.
“The partnership is focused on how we can learn and test together,” added Futrell, who explained that retail media is wholly different from “a traditional media plan.”
Futrell, who spent years in the brick-and-mortar grocery industry, said ecommerce allows brands like General Mills to not just sell products but to tell their story with new ad formats. One of them, shoppable display, launched last year. “It’s meant to share your brand story as well as provide product solutions,” she added.
“We’re looking for mutual benefit, mutual growth together, and that happens through early joint business planning,” said O’Hara, who has been with Instacart for five years and has been working on the General Mills partnership “since day one.”
“When we test, we learn, and sometimes we fail together and then pivot to have a win, win, win for us, for partners and for consumers,” O’Hara added.
“It allows you to really build a tentpole moment, or go small and test and learn,” Futrell said of Instacart’s dynamic platform.
“One difference that sets us apart is we are not a retailer—we are a tech platform that retailers can sit on top of,” said O’Hara. “We are trying to enable our partners, which includes more than 1,200 banners and 80,000 stores.”
Other partner innovations include objective-based buying “to help partners optimize their plans as well as optimized bidding. So you set it and forget it,” said O’Hara.
As for what makes partnerships like General Mills and Instacart succeed, it starts with trust. “You have to have a learning mindset,” said Futrell. “I consider my Instacart partners as part of my team, and being willing to share more than you might be willing to will drive a better result.”
