As part of the partnership, customers may order delivery of fresh, natural and organic products from Sprouts through delivery.sprouts.com or the Instacart website or mobile app. Food may be delivered the same day, within one or two hours or scheduled for delivery later in the week, Sprouts said.
Sprouts currently offers home delivery in eight cities and will roll out the Instacart services to markets in phases, beginning with select ZIP codes in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona, immediately. Additional markets will be announced at a later date.
In a Jan. 9 presentation at the ICR Conference in Orlando, Florida, Amin N. Maredia, CEO of Sprouts, elaborated on the role of home delivery.
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| Amin Maredia, CEO of Sprouts |
“As we’ve learned a lot about e-commerce and the home delivery business in grocery, one of the key interesting things that for Sprouts and retailers, who were further spread apart as opposed to maybe conventionals who have a concentration of stores every two, three miles apart, we’ve seen that as a very positive, productive activity for us because it’s expanded customer and transaction count, and it’s a profitable business for us,” Maredia said. “So we don’t think of it as a burden of home delivery. We think of it as an opportunity. So our spacing as a healthy food retailer or a specialty store — some people might put us in the specialty category — is actually beneficial.”
He described home delivery services as a “trade area expansion.”
“As many of you know, most people shop grocery five to seven minutes from where they live,” he said. “This allows us to capture customers outside that seven-minute trade area, so that’s great. Second is we think of home delivery as, we want to be where the customer wants us to be. So we want to be channel agnostic. So it would be through both our own website over time as well as third-party partnerships. And at the end of the day, our focus is on the customer and how can we execute well and be where the customer wants us to be.”
