Instacart Wasn't Ready To Be Essential

The grocery delivery startup added 300,000 workers in eight weeks, but Covid-19 is still overtaking it in more ways than one

- Ellen Huet and Lizette Chapman With Josh Eidelson

For the first-ever Zoom call with all 1,200 of his fulltime employees, Instacart Chief Executive Officer Apoorva Mehta had an inspiring speech ready to go. It was all about coming together, noble missions, wartime footings, and the sudden ascension of Instacart Inc. from mere grocery delivery app to essential service for the human species. Then the fire alarm went off.

This was in late March, a couple of days after Californians had been ordered to shelter in place, and Mehta’s San Francisco landlord hadn’t thought to reschedule his apartment building’s routine safety test. The alarm, screeching over the Instacart team’s home-office computer speakers, was at just the right pitch to set off dogs, which could now be heard barking frantically via the microphones of employees who’d neglected to mute. Mehta was stuck. “It wasn’t one of those all-hands where I could have put myself on mute,” he says. “I was presenting.”

Covid-19 was going to change everything, he told his staff as best he could over the cacophony, and Instacart would have to prepare for an onslaught. Within weeks, the company was going to face stress on operations greater than anything anyone had experienced. “It couldn’t have been worse audio,” says Nilam Ganenthiran, Instacart’s president. “I guess it was prophetic.”