DoorDash and Uber's Distribution Edge

The real threat is not that DoorDash and Uber copied grocery delivery, it is that they turned grocery into one more tab inside a much larger habit. Instacart built a dedicated grocery marketplace, but DoorDash and Uber can put Aldi or Sprouts in front of people who already open their apps for dinner, then reuse the same couriers, memberships, and checkout flow to win grocery orders without building demand from scratch.

• Instacart’s core workflow is a third party marketplace. A customer browses store inventory in the app, a gig shopper goes into the store, picks items, checks out, and delivers. DoorDash and Uber entered grocery with the same basic merchant and courier setup, so the product looks familiar to shoppers and retailers.
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• The difference is distribution. DoorDash launched grocery in 2020, then used DashPass and its existing restaurant traffic to make Aldi available to customers already buying meals and convenience items. Uber followed the same playbook, expanding grocery inside Uber Eats and adding chains like Sprouts and later Aldi to a food delivery audience it already owned.
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• That cross sell matters because online grocery is a hard business to make profitable. Delivery and picking can easily eat $10 to $30 per order, so the cheapest customer is one already on the app. Food delivery platforms can spread marketing, courier utilization, and subscription value across meals, groceries, and convenience, while Instacart depends more heavily on grocery alone.
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The market is heading toward multi category delivery apps with grocery as a retention layer, not a standalone novelty. Instacart’s path forward is to stay valuable to grocers through software, ads, and merchant tools, while DoorDash and Uber keep using grocery to deepen frequency and make their consumer apps the default place to buy food in any form.