Instacart as EBT payments layer
Justin Intal, CEO of Forage, on helping online grocery platforms process EBT
This reveals how much online SNAP lived inside marketplace infrastructure rather than grocers' own checkout stacks. Large chains could reach EBT shoppers through Instacart without rebuilding their websites, payment routing, compliance flows, and USDA approval process themselves. That made Instacart more than a delivery app. It became the outsourced payments and regulatory layer for grocers that wanted online SNAP demand without funding a long internal build.
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The bottleneck was not just adding another tender type. Online SNAP requires item level eligibility checks, split tender logic for non eligible items and fees, secure card handling, and federal approval. In the Forage interview, Instacart is described as using a large team for about nine months, while Amazon and Walmart took about 18 months.
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Instacart turned that hard build into a shared service. By July 2022, it said Carrot Payments let grocers accept EBT SNAP both in the Instacart app and on storefronts built with Instacart technology, and that it had expanded this capability across 49 states and Washington, D.C. That is why chains could support SNAP online without a fully independent solution.
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The contrast with Amazon and Walmart matters. USDA says they were among the initial pilot retailers selected in 2017, which fits the pattern of only the biggest operators building direct capability early. Everyone else had stronger incentives to plug into a platform that already knew how to get retailers through certification and live operations.
The next step is more grocers moving from marketplace dependence to platform assisted ownership. As payments, compliance, and storefront tools get packaged into infrastructure products, online SNAP should spread from a feature available on Instacart to a standard capability embedded across grocers' own sites, with specialists like Forage pushing that shift further down market.