Instacart, a Feeding America Supporting Partner, has a mission to ensure everyone has access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together.
With that mission and a commitment to use their technology to increase access to food, Instacart looks for partners, like Feeding America, where Instacart’s support can extend an organization’s mission in support of its community.
Since 2018, Instacart has done just that in its partnership with Feeding America, donating more than 14 million meals for neighbors facing hunger. From financial donations to technology innovations to volunteerism, Instacart continually seeks to help people access nutritious, preferred food, tailoring their activations to drive the most impact in high-need communities.
Giving Back to Food Banks with Just a Few Taps
To support Feeding America partner food banks, Instacart launched Community Carts in 2022, reimagining traditional food drives. With Community Carts, customers can use the Instacart app to donate groceries directly to over 300 food banks nationwide.
“Food banks sometimes receive food that doesn’t meet their criteria or it may not be the food neighbors in their community say they need the most,” said Laura Anderson, Director of Social Impact for Instacart. “Community Carts provides food banks an opportunity to create a wish list of their most-needed items, and then Instacart posts those lists online so people across the country can take action and support local food banks.”
Customers can review and purchase items from the wish lists, and those donations are automatically delivered to the partner food bank—with Instacart waiving the delivery and service fees on every order.
Since launching in November of 2022, Community Carts has provided more than 430,000 grocery items to nonprofit partners through the generosity of Instacart’s customers to help neighbors facing hunger.
“Before launching Community Carts, we had been asking our customers when and how they donate, and one of the learnings was that it can be difficult for them to have time to go to the grocery store to buy donations and then travel to drop them off,” Anderson said. “Community Carts helps our customers give back easily and food banks receive what they need for the people they serve.”
This includes relief efforts in the wake of a natural disaster and during unprecedented times, like the historic government shutdown, which began Oct. 1, 2025 and lasted 43 days—and marked the first time in our country’s history that the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was disrupted, affecting more than 40 million program participants.
In advance of the lapse in SNAP benefits, and to help food banks stock up on the exact items they needed, Instacart expanded Community Carts, nearly tripling the size of the program to support more than 300 Feeding America network members across the country.
Driving the Connection Between Food and Health
Across the Feeding America network, nearly half of all food banks are engaging with health care partners to support access to healthy food, with the goal of improving individual and community health. These partnership activities generally involve identifying individuals/patients who are food insecure and referring them to existing food pantries and food bank programs or creating new distribution programs onsite at the health care setting. Referrals for SNAP application assistance and support for other benefits are important components of this work, as well.
Instacart also believes in the power of food as medicine and conducts research, uses technology and advocates for policies that make it as easy for providers to prescribe food as it is to prescribe medicine.
In fiscal year 2025, Instacart invested a $150,000 grant to support four food banks as they implement initiatives that address barriers to nutrition
security. The grant will help food banks deliver fresh, nutritious food directly to households facing high levels of food insecurity, while strengthening their capacity to run effective Food as Medicine initiatives.
“Feeding America has a long history of investing in Food as Medicine initiatives and we knew that our technology could support further scaling these efforts,” Anderson said. “This grant is designed to help food banks kick start or further invest in these vital programs.”
Fun Fib for a Good Cause
Before closing out the 2025 holiday season, Instacart launched its new Lie Pie Campaign, with sales of the limited-edition pie kits in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City benefiting Feeding America.
Each Lie Pie kit included a perfectly baked pie, along with a few essentials—including flour to dust the counter, crushed eggshells and a pumpkin-scented room spray—to help each ‘baker’ make it seem like the dessert was homemade.
The campaign, which ran Nov. 14-23, helped provide more than 100,000 meals for people facing hunger.
