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DoorDash Reaches for Instacart

DoorDash said it plans to acquire Instacart in a deal valued at about $17 billion, a move that would bring together two companies that built themselves around slightly different versions of the same modern reflex: have someone else bring it over.

By Isla Camilleri 2 min read AI-written

The combination would join DoorDash’s long-established restaurant delivery business with Instacart’s grocery network and retail technology operation. Instacart now works with thousands of retailers in North America and sells tools to stores including digital price tags and smart shopping carts. DoorDash, for its part, has been pushing further into grocery since the pandemic helped turn delivery from occasional convenience into household routine.

That is the plain business logic of it. DoorDash gets a deeper hold in groceries without building the whole thing from scratch. Instacart gets folded into a larger delivery company whose name is already attached, for many customers, to dinner showing up fast.

The companies said the deal is expected to close at the end of 2027 or in the first half of 2028. For now, it is an announced acquisition, not a finished one.

If it goes through, the combined company would be a more muscular rival in a grocery delivery market that already includes Amazon and Uber. Amazon has spent years trying to grow grocery sales, including expanding same-day perishable food delivery in more parts of the US over the past year. Uber has also expanded its restaurant and grocery delivery business through Uber Eats.

Scale is the attraction here, and also the point of tension. A larger platform can offer customers more stores, more coverage and more reasons to leave routine shopping inside the app. It can also concentrate more of that routine inside fewer companies. Grocery delivery is not a niche indulgence anymore; it is one of those services that starts as convenience and ends up woven into how people manage a week.

There is another constant beneath both businesses: labor. DoorDash and Instacart have relied on gig workers to pick orders and make deliveries. As independent contractors, most do not receive many of the benefits full-time workers typically do, such as health insurance or retirement contributions. The announcement says plenty about scale and competition. It says less about the people carrying the bags.

Original sources

About the writer
Isla Camilleri Global Affairs & Lifestyle Editor

Isla Camilleri lost her mother at four, grew up in every city her diplomat father was posted to, married at 22 and left at 23, and came back to Malta to open a café-boutique in Valletta that sells couture and coffee to people who understand both. She covers the world the way someone searches for something — thoroughly, and without quite finding it. Borders have always felt temporary to her; their consequences never have. She looks for the person inside the international headline and refuses to let distance make that person smaller.

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