Instacart launches video feed for recipe discovery and shopping

Instacart is pushing grocery discovery into a format that looks more like social video than a supermarket aisle. The company launched Immersive Feed on June 22 as a short-form, vertical video feed for advertisers, letting shoppers browse meals and recipes inside retail storefronts and add items to cart without leaving the experience. Hellmann’s, Kettle & Fire, Rachael Ray Nutrish and Siete Foods were named as the first brand partners, and the feature is in pilot.

The move sits inside Instacart’s broader inspiration ads business. The company says brand partners can run Immersive Feed campaigns through Ads Manager using existing vertical video assets or new creative, and its docs describe inspiration ads as flexible merchandising solutions meant to spark out-of-aisle discovery and build long-term brand equity. Instacart has also said its recipe and occasion ads already drive large shares of out-of-aisle impressions and new-to-brand sales, a sign that the company sees inspiration as a conversion engine, not just a branding play.

For Trader Joe’s, that matters because the chain has always won through in-store discovery rather than a heavy digital ad stack. Trader Joe’s says it has been transforming grocery shopping into a welcoming journey full of discovery and fun since 1967, when Joe Coulombe opened the first store in Pasadena, California. The company still leans on a national network of neighborhood grocery stores and knowledgeable, friendly Crew Members, which means the store itself remains the main media channel. Packaging, naming, and the quick recommendation from a Crew Member still do a lot of the work that a paid video feed now tries to do online.

The scale of that store model is still substantial. ScrapeHero counted 656 Trader Joe’s locations in the United States as of June 15, 2026, spread across 43 states and territories, with California alone home to 208 stores. That footprint gives Trader Joe’s a large audience for any shopper who arrives with a digital idea already in mind, but it also raises the stakes for the person on the floor who has to turn that idea into a good basket.

The bigger shift is that grocery shopping is starting earlier, in a media feed, and ending later, at the shelf. For Trader Joe’s, the challenge is not to copy Instacart’s format, but to keep the in-store discovery model sharp enough that a shopper who came in with a recipe video still leaves talking about what they found in the aisle.