All right, we're going to go ahead and get started. I'm going to read Safe Harbor first. Some of the statements made today by Instacart may be considered forward-looking. These statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statements made today by the company are based on assumptions as of today, and Instacart undertakes no obligation to update them. Please refer to Instacart's most recent Form 10Q for discussion of the risk factors that may impact actual results. Emily may also reference certain non-GAAP financial metrics, and reconciliations are available on CART's investor relations website. Okay, so I'm Doug Anmuth, JPMorgan's internet analyst. Please stay with us. Instacart CFO, Emily Reuter.
Instacart is a leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,800 retail banners on their marketplace, also powering the enterprise storefronts for about 600 retail banners. Emily has been CFO of Instacart for more than a year. Prior to that, she spent nearly a decade at Uber, most recently as Head of Corporate Finance and also as CFO of Uber's mobility business. So welcome, Emily.
Thanks so much. Happy to be here.
All right, Instacart had a little bit of news last week about Fidji Simo, your CEO, stepping down from her role. Can you talk about that and what that means for Instacart?
Sure. I think first and foremost, Fidji has been an incredible leader for the company for the last four years. I think that's really important because she's really set up a foundation for us to be able to continue forward from. Meaning, I think she's really left the business in a very strong position that gives her the ability to go on and take on this very exciting role that she's pursuing, leaving behind a foundation of a company that's been growing double digits for several quarters in a row, a management team that works incredibly well together, many of whom have been at the company for quite some time, and a really clear vision and strategy for how to execute on the future. Now, what does that mean in terms of the future?
The board has indicated, and we indicated externally when we made the announcement, that the board's intending to tap an internal candidate for the successor role. I think that's important because I think it speaks to the board's conviction in our strategy and a desire to continue on that strategy, both in terms of the overall strategic vision, but also our focus on financial discipline. I think as a result of that, I think we're talking about weeks, not months, before we have clarity on leadership. My expectation, given our ability already and the way that we all work together day to day on decision-making, is for that to continue when that transition takes place. Fidji will also stay on the board. She will continue to be the chair of the board.
I think that will also play a role in terms of continuity of the transition.
Okay, great. That's very helpful. I mentioned that you've been in the CFO seat for about a year now. What are some of those key learnings that you've had over the past year, and what are your top priorities going forward?
Sure. I think the priorities sort of remain the same, which is that we continue to be incredibly excited about the overall market opportunity. Really, my goal, or our goal as the category leader and far and away leader, particularly in the large basket segment of the category, is to continue to drive online penetration. We are doing that by focusing on the things that really we think are differentiated when it comes to Instacart. That is our retailer relationships. That means that we are able to do integrations that others cannot that help us integrate with loyalty programs or launch things like flyers that allow us to drive savings for users at the end of the day. We know that affordability really matters in terms of online adoption and retention.
We leverage those retailer relationships ultimately to be able to take advantage and provide those savings at the end of the day to customers. Another area that we are uniquely advantaged is just in terms of our operational effectiveness and scale. You see that in terms of our ability to really drive efficiencies in terms of our ability to get you your order and do it in an incredibly effective way, efficient way, get it to you in 30 minutes, in many cases, 50 minutes, and drive down those costs. What you've seen us do then is utilize that to reinvest in the business.
We're not just efficient for efficiency's sake, but we're taking those savings and investing in consumer pricing, investing in things like the expansion of our IC Plus membership benefits, investing in incentives that are targeted to try to get you as a consumer to take actions that we think ultimately will drive retention behavior. Another area that we are focused on leveraging is really our data. We do that in terms of making sure that we have better inventory data than anyone else. That means that we can have higher quality. It also means we can provide a more personalized service to our consumers, which makes the shopping experience better, but also faster and more efficient because I'm serving you up the things that you want to see.
All of that together, I think, has resulted in pretty great performance over the last couple of quarters that I'm very focused on. I take all of that, and then I tie it back to the economics, which is we've been able to grow the business and then also show very consistent overall profitability progression. I think more of the same.
Okay, great. We've certainly had a lot of noise in general just around macro due to tariffs and inflation. We think about grocery as somewhat more resilient. Can you talk about how Instacart operates in a recessionary environment? Have you seen any indications that customers are changing their behavior at all?
Sure. It's interesting. It's obviously like many others, we're looking at this day in and day out and really trying to slice the data from any angle that we can see that may indicate that there has been a shift in behavior. That is looking at geographies, income levels, premium retailers versus discount retailers. Really, what we've been pleased to see is that we're not seeing anything change from what we would have expected. We said that through April as of our earnings call at the beginning of May. That gives us great confidence in our ability to handle any sort of future state. If you look back, Instacart has evolved and adapted in a lot of different environments, right, from the COVID impact to very, very high inflationary impact.
What we found in those scenarios is that, one, grocery is essential, which is good news for us. Of course, you could regard grocery delivery, the delivery component, as being more discretionary in nature. What we've found even in these situations is that the convenience element really matters to people. People are willing to pay up, even if they're cutting back in other areas of their overall spend, that they're willing to pay for convenience. That has held up over time. Of course, we're obviously ready to act in any sort of environment. We feel like we have quite a lot of levers at our disposal to react should the consumer environment shift. As of right now, nothing that we've seen makes us concerned.
Okay. GTV grew about 10% in 2024. One of the key investor questions is just around sustainability of the double-digit GTV growth. Maybe you can talk about some of the keys to driving that double-digit GTV level over the next few years.
Sure. I think there's a handful of things that we're doing or have been doing and I think we'll continue to do to drive overall GTV growth. What I'd say is there's not one big thing. There's not one big unlock. It's a lot of different things that work together to ultimately continue to drive order frequency, user growth to ultimately get to very solid and consistent GTV growth that we've had for many quarters in a row now. It starts, obviously, with attracting new users to the platform. On the one hand, we've had many people have used Instacart over the course of the history of the company. At the same time, we are continuing to attract more new users to the platform today than we did pre-pandemic. We know that there is more untapped opportunity. We did that in 2024.
We're doing that again in Q1 of 2025. Attracting new users to the platform, whether that's through brand marketing, paid marketing, et cetera, is a core part of the strategy. We're continuing to get more efficient in terms of our marketing spend. The second is, how do I engage my existing users? When I say existing users, I mean both now, the monthly actives, but also folks that are coming less frequently than that, yearly active, or even folks that came in the past and for some reason churned off the platform. How do I re-engage them? There's a number of different things that we're doing to re-engage those users, everything from, again, marketing, but also incentivizing a particular behavior, bringing someone back onto the platform. Once they come back, the platform itself has improved.
You have everything from improved order quality, which we know is incredibly important, right? You obviously want to get what you ordered, which sounds easier than it is. We do that far away better than anyone else. If you look at the statistics, our perfect found and fill rate has increased 15% over the last three years. That is a giant step function. If you came a year ago, two years ago, and you had a bad experience, if I can just get you to come back to Instacart and have a new experience in our new environment, the likelihood that you retain is significantly higher. Overall, we've continued to expand the set of use cases for consumers. You saw us add a restaurant's offering through our partnership with Eats back in June of last year.
That has been an important offering for folks to be able to take advantage of their Instacart Plus membership. This is an additional benefit that we have layered in. It is also a more frequent use case, as we know. People come back throughout the week. That keeps Instacart top of mind. What we have seen is that if you adopt restaurants, you then come back and spend more incremental dollars on grocery. That is a key part of the flywheel. We know that is working. We are going to continue to optimize that to make sure it serves us even more effectively. That is a key part of that. More recently, you saw us reduce our minimum basket size for Instacart Plus membership to $10. Why would we do that?
For our customers, we want to make sure that we're there for them regardless of the use case. We know the core use case. We know online grocery. The vast majority of the market is in large baskets. We are the far and away leader. If you, as a customer, have a need midweek or you forgot something, we certainly do not want a delivery fee to be the barrier that causes you to think about a different player or causes you not to get what you need at that point in time. That is what we're seeing. We are not seeing trade down. You are not taking your $100 order and turning it into multiple small basket orders. What you are doing is driving increased order frequency, incremental GTV, increased IC Plus adoption.
It is these platform benefits from getting better at what we do in the core business, adding additional use cases, finding opportunities to drive affordability that together result in what you mentioned, which is really strong growth. That is growth that is driven by new users. It is driven by order frequency. We are seeing IC Plus grow faster than overall user growth. The things that we look at and measure and track every day, we are seeing a lot of goodness there. Think more of what we do, finding more of those things that can unlock user frequency, and doing it all while we have been driving up profitability.
Okay, great. Let's go back to the Uber partnership for a minute. You've called out the positive impact that it's had in the last couple of quarters. Maybe you can just dig a little bit deeper into that virtuous cycle, the positive effects there, and just what you anticipate as you lap the launch in June?
Yeah. A big part of the thesis, as I talked about, was how does adding an additional service feed back into our ecosystem? The idea was never, hey, we're just going to launch restaurants as a standalone offering that is just sort of self-contained. It was always, we think this is a service that our customers are interested in. How do we then tie that back to make sure they're coming back to Instacart more regularly, right? Obviously, adding it, the benefit as part of Instacart Plus was a key part of that. Also, again, the thesis, you open up the app more regularly, we're more top of mind. That's exactly what we're seeing. It's actually been improving over time. By it, I mean that if you adopt restaurants, you spend more and increasingly so on grocery.
That is why we're excited about the partnership that we launched with Uber. The partnership launched in June of 2024. I do get a lot of questions around, okay, what does this mean? I think the reality is, on the one hand, while we're very excited about what we've been able to accomplish from a partnership standpoint, we also think there's a lot of runway. We certainly are not done. We think there's a lot more to come. In any sort of launch, when you lap the launch, the contribution or impact to growth may moderate over time as you lap. In terms of what we're expecting, we're not expecting any sort of sudden or meaningful cliff, so to speak, in terms of the impact.
Okay, great. You mentioned the $10 basket for Instacart Plus users. Let's talk more about that recent introduction. I guess a key question that we've been getting is just how do you make the economics work on a $10 basket and what kind of batching is needed and other kinds of efficiencies to really make that work on the economics?
Sure. I think just to take a step back and talk about strategy, and I started to touch on this a moment ago, really where the thought process comes from of lowering the minimum basket is not, hey, I'm purely going after small baskets for the sake of going small baskets. It's we have customers that use us. They come to us for their large baskets. We are, amongst digital-first players, the far and away leader in large baskets, very differentiated, right, where others have made little to no progress from an AOV perspective in terms of penetrating this subsegment of the category. Now, that also means our customers may have use cases that are outside of the large baskets. We want to make sure that we're there to serve them.
We certainly don't want to put people in a position where a fee means that I'm going to think about either not executing an order or think about going to another platform. With that mind frame, we thought, okay, can we actually expand our set of services? Now, what's unique about Instacart is the scale and density of our orders allow us now, maybe that wasn't true three years ago, two years ago, but today to layer on smaller baskets in a way that even out of the gates are at economics that we feel good about. Now, does that mean we're fully optimized for the economics? No. Even since we launched, which was just a couple of months ago, we launched in February, we're already seeing great progress against optimizing. That does include things like batching.
Again, because we have, you're not launching small baskets in a vacuum. You're launching on top of a network of orders where the majority of our orders are already batched, right? If I can layer on and batch an incremental small basket, and small baskets are easier to batch, it's a couple of orders versus could be 10 plus items, that allows us to drive those efficiencies. I think part of the decision-making when we did launch it, we feel really good about our operational capabilities, right? We've proven to ourselves and to others that if you start here, we're going to be able to make progress very quickly. We knew what we were capable of, and we're seeing that play out. That and if you do it right, you drive overall ecosystem benefit, you drive retention, and that means more big baskets over time.
We never think about these things sort of on a standalone basis, though obviously executing it in a unit economic way that we like is also important.
Okay. Transaction revenue. You've been reinvesting shopper efficiencies to drive top-line growth. How much more room do you see to drive further efficiencies there? What are some of the key areas that you're investing back into?
Sure. So look, shopper efficiencies are a piece of the pie, but I would be remiss to say that that's sort of the one thing. So I'll talk about shopper efficiencies first. Every minute, every second in terms of getting a shopper from the order through the store to the consumer matters in terms of overall cost. We think about shaving seconds off of the order, and that ultimately is what adds up to meaningful savings over time. Just to paint a picture, everything from order density, which is where we start, means that majority of our orders are accepted by a shopper that's either in the store or within a mile of the store. There's very little lag time between getting a shopper from 20 minutes away to the store. We're already in many cases there.
Getting them through the store, which is very, very different than going and picking up a plastic bag off a counter and getting back to the consumer. You're trying to find items, many of which you may not have selected before. And our app, in 75% of orders, has a planogram, which is effectively a map of the inside of the grocery store with where everything is. So we can direct the shopper exactly to the aisle where the item is. We have a technology called Pick to Light Technology. It integrates with the retailer digital tags on the shelves. And so 10% of our orders, those tags light up. You can imagine kind of the difference between walking through an aisle looking for some item you've never heard of before versus the tag lights up, I grab it off the shelf, I put it in the bag.
In some cases, we actually also bypass the checkout line, which again saves minutes. You layer that on top of overall batching, which we've increasingly been able to do in some cases, adding more and more. It's not just one to two. It can be two to three, maybe three to four. You sort of keep working your way up. In some cases, we've actually been able to batch priority orders, which is really exciting to me because previously that was sort of off limits, right? You charge more so that we're getting the items directly to you. We're so efficient now that I can do both. I can batch it and I can still get it to you. That's pretty incredible. Now, that's a piece of the puzzle. Obviously, that shows up within transaction revenue, which is great.
We can then reinvest in other parts of transaction revenue. That is, of course, not the only place we're getting leverage. We've been driving very strong overall non-GAAP OpEx leverage. I think that will continue to be a source of leverage for us. I say that because at the end of the day, I'm managing the business overall profitability, not to transaction revenue, but it's still important. Now, where are we investing? Definitely affordability. That is things like incentives, which are more targeted ways of getting at affordability, lower prices like the $10 minimum basket. You saw us last year introduce free delivery for later in the day or next day delivery.
There are variations of how do we make sure that we have a suite of services that address all the different population needs at affordable pricing to the premium services because we certainly have price-sensitive users and making sure we have something for everyone. We've also invested in use cases, right? We just talked about $10 minimum. We talked about restaurants. We just relaunched our partnership with Chase, which will bring benefits to those users and we think tap into a brand new population of cardholders that we haven't had a chance to address before. Those are a couple of the key areas we're investing.
Okay. When you put all of that together, how should we think about transaction take rate going forward?
Transaction take rate has been in the low sevens for a while now. I would say, as a reminder, our long-term transaction as a percentage of GTV target is 6.5%-7.5%. We are very comfortably in that range. What I would say is that I would say two things. One is I do expect transaction take rate to fluctuate over time. I have said this very consistently since I have taken this seat. I know quarter to quarter that can obviously cause some either surprise or consternation around what does this mean if it goes up, if it goes down, is it moving up into the right?
My intention is not explicitly not to move it up into the right because I do not think we are at a place and time in the company where it is time to do that as in as long as there is good opportunity to reinvest that we feel really good about the ROI of that dollar, then we should be reinvesting. The goal there is not up into the right. The other thing is that there are elements of our reinvestment strategy that hit in different parts of the P&L. An investment in incentives is, of course, going to put pressure on transaction take rate. An investment in brand marketing is going to hit in sales and marketing. Now, if it is a good dollar and it is the best dollar, it is the best next dollar for us to spend as a company, then we will spend it wherever we should spend it.
Same goes for how we source those dollars. Whenever an idea comes up internally, hey, this is something we want to go after, we of course first and foremost look at the investment case, what kind of growth is this going to drive, does this make sense? We say, okay, how are we going to fund it? It's not incremental dollars, right? You have seen this very consistently for us. I think a lot of conversations I have get really focused on one element of our strategy, hey, let's talk about this very specific thing. The reality is internally, we're talking about what are the five best things that we're doing right now and how do I fund them? We are looking at the bottom of the list and say, okay, what is our least efficient spend?
We'll cut that and we'll keep reinvesting in the top five ideas and keep recycling dollars. That's allowed us to both invest in terms of continuing to drive growth in a giant overall market opportunity, but also do that at the same time as taking up profitability. The long way of saying that is I manage the business towards profitability goals. That can mean transaction revenue moves up and down. In my view, as long as I'm marching up profitability as I've committed to doing on a full year basis for 2025 over 2024 on an absolute and margin basis, then the nuances of quarter to quarter transaction revenue may fluctuate. I don't think they're as meaningful to the long-term story.
Okay. All right. Clear. Let's talk about advertising a little bit. You guided to 2Q ad and other revenue growing modestly faster than GTV. You've also called out hearing some caution from brands. How should we think about the drivers of sustainable ad dollar growth and then the path to long-term ad and other investment rates of 4%-5% of GTV?
Sure. I think first and foremost, I'll talk about kind of the current state and then we can kind of get to the future. If I look at the last several quarters, we've had pretty strong performance on ads and other, not where ultimately we'd like to be. I'd love to be growing much faster than GTV on a consistent basis, but overall growing the business and I think focus on the things that are ultimately focused on building the biggest ads business that we can and driving that at outsized growth rates over a long period of time. That may be a little different than what we'll see in the short term, but overall, we're focused on the things that we think enable us to do that. That is continuing to build on our scale.
We have a giant platform, one-stop shop for CPGs to be able to address consumers across 1,800 retailers, across over 220 Carrot Ads partners. In the future, in our Caper Ads product, which will be in store at the point of decision-making, really bottom of funnel to be able to influence consumers. We think that scale is incredibly important and we are very focused on continuing that. You have seen us build out our Carrot Ads partners, but you have also seen us partner with players that maybe no one would have thought we would partner with a couple of years ago, right?
You saw Thrive, Uber Eats US grocery and retail business where we're now going to be powering for all of these partners the technology and bringing our ads demand to the table, which reinforces the scale, which means more CPGs want to work with us because they'd rather work with a small handful of players. That's going to be a handful of players that do it for themselves and one large retail media network that can do it on behalf of all these other players. It's investing in the technology itself. We have best-in-class ROAS, 15% sales lift. We are able to show our capabilities through partnerships with external measurement to validate our capabilities. Innovation in terms of the formats that we bring to the table and we're continuing to expand on that. All of that means that we have the sort of core capabilities.
We then layer on top of that, continuing to build out our relationships with not just large advertisers, which is where the business really started. That is a bit more of a white glove service where you've got salespeople out working with the largest CPGs in the world to becoming less concentrated in those large advertisers through relationships with the longer tail. Those are going to be more self-serve capabilities, which we've been building out over the last year. You've seen that. We've talked about emerging brand growth being an important component of our overall growth picture last year. What happened in Q1 I'd view as everything really working really well together, right? It's all of the things we've built, large brands, small brands, everything really came to play. It was stronger than we expected, frankly. Great to see.
If I think about how we've been doing over the last several quarters and the guide to modestly faster than our GTV expectations, I think we've shown sort of a consistent overall story here that we're on track to build a really important overall ads business.
Okay. Great. Let's shift gears, talk about margins. You've talked about EBITDA continuing to improve through the rest of the year. How should we think about overall margin expansion just in the context of some of the new growth initiatives having lower margin contribution?
Sure. Look, I think we've committed to continued expansion of EBITDA on an absolute basis and on a margin basis. It's my job to figure out if we're going to go pursue an opportunity, how are we funding it? As I said earlier, none of these decisions are ever made in a vacuum. It's never purely let's add on something new without finding a source of capital somewhere else. I think about this really as a fluid set of decisions where if we find something we're excited about, we'll make it work through other savings elsewhere in the P&L.
As I said, that may not always be like for like in terms of where it shows up in the P&L, but in terms of where we are as a business, in terms of where we are, in terms of tapping into the overall market potential, as long as we continue to drive overall EBITDA progression, then we feel really good that we should be using the opportunity at 13% online penetration of grocery to find opportunities to reinvest. That is really what we are doing and what we are seeing. We think that over time we are driving overall engagement with our platform, overall online grocery adoption, and we are utilizing these other investments to really reinforce our relationship with the consumer.
Okay. What does that mean for incremental margins through the remainder of the year and kind of longer term?
Yeah. We have not been specific about that. I think incremental margins quarter -to -quarter can fluctuate. There is always some noise that can come up. We look at incremental margins, but so long as incremental margins sort of make sense that they are higher over a multi-quarter period than our long-term margin targets, then from my vantage point, we are making progress towards what we said we would do. At this point in our journey, I do not think we should be making progress more quickly. I think we should be reinvesting in the opportunity so long as the math suggests that those investments play out over a period of time.
Okay. All right. On GenAI, you've been a leader in implementing across the platform. Maybe you can just talk about some of the main initiatives that you've been focused on and what you're thinking about going forward.
Sure. I think there's probably something to speak about GenAI kind of in every area of our business, but I'll start with just the pure fact that I think on the earnings call or in the Q&A, we talked about how 87% of our code is deployed having utilized AI in some capacity or having touched AI. I think it speaks to that culture of really leaning in to tools that are going to make us more efficient, which is why even just tying back to your margin profile question, if I can drive meaningful leverage from other parts of the business and reinvest it, even better, right? It doesn't necessarily have to come from some prescribed area. From a logistics perspective, it's already been an important part of our overall capability.
If you think about things like batching and our capabilities on distribution and logistics, this is something that's been very integrated. We are obviously then taking it to the next level through generative AI, but ML and other AI functions have always been a part of what we do. More recently, from a consumer lens, I think there's some interesting things that we're doing, again, in terms of making that consumer experience easier, more fluid, more personalized, right? People are expecting more personalization. You see that we just announced Smart Shop that's designed to be more personalized to you and your family. Another way to think about it is it's allowed us to tag billions of data points to then identify individual items as having a certain nutritional attribute. Think gluten-free or dairy-free or low-fat or something.
We know that the majority of our customers have some sort of dietary restriction, which means that when you come online, we know and we can serve up to you, hey, here is the selection for your daughter who has this allergy or for you because you're on this particular diet and give you inspiration, but also make that finding process just much more seamless. Those are the kinds of consumer-related areas. We also talked about our ability to scan the shelves in store and use AI to very quickly identify what's on the shelf. That is going to help with inventory, both for us, for our retail partners, for brands who are very interested when their items are not on the shelf. We think there is a lot more we can do with that.
Okay. Capital allocation. You've done significant buybacks since the IPO. Just as you continue to grow profitability and you're on track to do $3 billion plus in free cash flow over the next three years, how should we think about capital returns as a consistent philosophy versus being opportunistic?
Yeah. Our approach has been consistent, which is opportunistic. We had the opportunity to be probably more opportunistic, I think, than normal throughout 2024, in part because of the dislocation of the stock, but also because we had some very early shareholders that were rotating out of the stock according to their sort of overall portfolio needs, especially around the time of the lockup. We had a strategy to go out and really try to say, hey, look, if you're going to sell, we'll just sort of do a direct transaction. You saw us do a number of those, a handful around the time of the lockup, one other in late summer.
That allowed us to a bit control the overall, both take advantage of we thought very attractive prices, which they were, and also to avoid having significant new supply come on to the market. 2024 really had the opportunity to be quite aggressive. I think going forward, be opportunistic. Obviously, we saw we bought $94 million worth of stock in Q1. We do have outstanding dollars remaining in our share repurchase program. I expect a continuation of what we've been doing.
Okay. All right. We're going to leave it there. Thank you, Emily.
Thank you so much. Thank you all.
Thanks, everybody.