Online grocery has spent a decade solving the delivery problem. The bill is what is stopping the checkout.
Speaking at Groceryshop in Las Vegas, Instacart CEO Chris Rogers said affordability is the number one reason people churn off online grocery — and the number one barrier to adopting it. DoorDash's vice president of grocery and retail partnerships, Mike Goldblatt, described price parity talks with retailers as a two-way conversation rather than a cost retailers must absorb alone.
The number that makes this more than talk: Instacart says retailers that adopt price parity are seeing online sales grow 10 percentage points faster than retailers that mark products up, and retain online shoppers better. In an emailed announcement, the company said 90% of U.S. consumers now have access to no-markup retailers on its platform, naming Raley's, Bashas, Fareway and Grocery Outlet among chains that recently eliminated markups.
Why retailers resisted for so long is straightforward: markups cover the real cost of picking, packing, and last-mile delivery. Removing them moves that cost onto the P&L, which is why Instacart frames the trade as defensive — in Rogers' words, the cost of losing sales and share to larger digital players might be greater than the cost of removing markups today.
Both platforms are pairing the price argument with membership mechanics. Instacart+ waives delivery fees on grocery orders over $10 and offers no-rush delivery discounts; DoorDash is pushing its own membership and SNAP/EBT access, where it now counts more than 4.5 million consumers with SNAP cards linked and nearly 75,000 participating stores — up from more than 50,000 in June 2025.
The stakes are visible in how both companies are repositioning. Instacart is presenting itself less as a delivery app and more as an operating system for grocery, while DoorDash keeps expanding retail partnerships beyond restaurants — including the nationwide Costco delivery rollout it announced in September.
For grocery operators, the parity decision is now a strategic one with visible data attached. The retailers holding markups are protecting margin per order; the ones dropping them are buying frequency and basket consolidation from shoppers who otherwise default to in-store. The markups also tend to compound: a shopper who sees a higher online price on a staple assumes the whole basket is overpriced, which makes every trip a comparison against the store down the street rather than a convenience calculation. Watch which side of that trade the next wave of regional chains picks — and whether the platforms publish parity data at the retailer level, which is the point where the argument stops being a pitch and becomes an accountability test.