Earlier today, I was lucky enough to have a great seat at Chef Nancy Silverton‘s cooking demo at Macy’s San Francisco. After having my first bite of this farro salad that she showed us how to prepare, I whipped out my phone, opened up my Instacart app, and placed a Rainbow Grocery order for all the ingredients, and scheduled it to arrive later this afternoon.
The ability to have a diverse range of high-quality food delivered to my home, at the swipe of my finger, has both seriously freed up my time, and encouraged me to be more spontaneous about trying new recipes, like this one. You see, I don’t drive. So going to the grocery store in person is the farthest point from a spontaneous act for me.
Now, Instacart isn’t my first foray into grocery delivery. Back in the day I’d been a heavy user of Kozmo.com and Webvan. More recently, I’d also shopped via email at my local whole foods through the Shop Hoppers service. But those experiences pale in comparison with what I have available to me now.
Instacart allows me to pick from a selection of local stores, including Falleti Foods, Bi-Rite, Whole Foods, and even Safeway. I additionally use good eggs to get a midweek farmers market delivery (key to ensuring I have good stuff to make a salad to take to work for lunch), google shopping express to get Target and BevMo delivered, and Caviar whenever I want to have dinner (or a couple of pints of Humphrey Slocombe ice cream) delivered.
If I had the time, of course, it would be a lot more fun to go an pick out my groceries myself. But the reality of startup life is I’m out the door before 7 a.m. to accommodate 8 a.m. meetings with our EMEA offices, and home around 7 each night. Which is why being able to use my phone to manage my pantry on-the-fly, and easily obtain the ingredients I need to make exactly what I want to eat for dinner, is pretty amazing.
I can’t wait to see what folks come up with next to make this city life even more convenient…