Instacart's Eversight Acquisition Inspired by Rising Prices

Instacart is expanding its advertising capabilities with the acquisition of Eversight, an AI-powered pricing and promotions platform for CPG brands and retailers, particularly within the grocery industry.

Eversight’s experimentation-based platform allows CPG brands and retailers to test and scale customized pricing and promotions directly with their individual customers. In a recent news release, Instacart said this automates processes that have traditionally been “highly manual and time-consuming” and lets brands and retailers engage in “shopper-centric optimization.”

Using its technology, Eversight surfaces real-time, custom insights that resonate with customers and impact their buying decisions into the promotions. For retail partners, Eversight lets them use their physical and digital storefronts to run ongoing individualized micro price point experiments at-scale.

"With higher inflation and the average cost of groceries up, we're taking even more steps to make food and daily essentials more affordable," said Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart, in the release.

By combining Eversight's expertise and Instacart's scale, partnerships and machine learning technology, the duo can help Instacart partners enhance their advertising strategies. CPG brands and retailers will have access to new individualized and customized pricing tools and insights via Instacart that create a bridge between online and offline behavior to improve sales and growth, along with customers' experiences, wherever they shop.

"We founded Eversight to help brands and retailers be more agile and consumer-centric with their pricing and promotions decisions. This is particularly critical in today's high inflation environment, with rapidly changing shopping behavior," said David Moran, co-founder and chairman of Eversight, in the release. "By joining Instacart, this technology can be scaled across online and offline pricing to help make buying groceries more affordable for everyone while also driving more value for CPGs and retailers."

For example, a CPG brand partner was looking to improve an in-store promotion's performance but was concerned about the risks that come with trialing new offers in-store. Eversight helped the brand quickly adjust the promotion, resulting in a 10% incremental unit sales growth, according to the release. The CPG replaced more than 100 weeks of the old promotion with the new offer.

In another example cited by Instacart, a retail partner wanted to improve its customer pricing perceptions without sacrificing its business performance. In five weeks of price experimentation, Eversight helped identify new price points that resonated with customers across 30 categories, which led to a 6% margin lift.

Eversight's CPG offerings will be part of the Instacart Ads product and technology suite. For retailers, Eversight's retail technology will be part of the Instacart Platform, a suite of solutions that enhance and digitize grocery retail to offer an omnichannel experience for customers. Specifically, Eversight will be available to retailers through Carrot Insights, Instacart's data dashboard that tracks key performance and operational metrics for retailers to help optimize operations and provide more connected online and in-store shopping experiences.

"Now more than ever, it's critical that we're delivering the right promotions to the right consumers. Eversight's real-world, real-time insights help us find the price point or promotion that resonates with our consumers and leads to a purchase," said Lynn Hemans, vice president of consumer intelligence & analytics for The Hershey Company, in the release. "The capabilities that Eversight and Instacart can bring to market together have the potential to be a significant improvement in how CPG brands learn, test and measure campaigns across the grocery industry."

"As a grocer serving 112 communities, we take our responsibility to provide affordable, fresh foods seriously, especially at a time when we know our customers are aiming to stretch their food dollars,” Tom Henry, chief data officer and deputy chief information officer for Schnucks, added.