Dani Dudeck is the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer for Instacart and oversees the company’s communications, social impact, policy and government affairs practice groups. Dudeck is a 20-year communications veteran and has worked with some of the fastest growing companies in the world at the intersection of entertainment, technology and pop-culture.

John Shegerian: Do you have a suggestion for a Rockstar Impact Podcast guest? Go to impactpodcast.com and just click be a guest to recommend someone today. This edition of the impact podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy, and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and impact partners. Closed Loops platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so honored to have with us today Dani Dudeck. She’s the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Instacart. Welcome, Dani, to the Impact Podcast.

Dani Dudeck: Thanks, Jon. Good to be here.

John: Hey, listen, we’ve been on for 17 or so years, and I’m really thankful for our audience. They’re paying attention to these important topics and people that we cover. But this is Instacart and your first time on. I’m super duper excited because this is a new economy brand that’s done so well and broken out and made a difference in everybody’s lives. I’m so happy you’re here today. But before we get talking about all the positive impact that you and your colleagues are making at Instacart, can you first share a little bit about your own personal journey and background? Where’d you grow up and how’d you get on this very important and wonderful journey that you’ve been on with regards to your career?

Dani: Sure. Happy to share a little bit about my background. I was born and raised in California. I know you’re Fresno-based now. This is an amazing state. I’ve just worked my way up it over the years. I grew up in San Diego, sort of North County. I mean, it’s hard to beat a little town called Poway. North County is kind of a suburb of San Diego. And I always knew very early on what I wanted to do. I grew up thinking I either wanted to be Bob Woodbird or Barbara Walters. I wasn’t sure which one. Going to school at USC in LA, so kind of, again, as I started to work my way up the state, it was a good fit. I mean, they have this incredible communication school, Annenberg. I’m on the board now at the center of PR there. I just built this connection with other communicators and journalists and those that wanted to pursue this work. I had an amazing time at school. I started my career kind of growing up in LA on the agency side, so the PR agency side, Conan Wolfe, and then Hilla Nolton, and then Edelman. Then I ended up across the table from a set of founders, the founders of MySpace. They were just onto this revolution at the dawn of social media. I pitched them and I fell in love with the product. I was already on the product. I was really young at the time and kind of was the only one who understood how it all worked. I felt this connection with what they were building. That was my first in-house experience. Then I moved to San Francisco and wanted to be closer to the tech action. I started working at Zynga, which is a mobile gaming company. Again, I found myself as the consumer of the product, Farmville and Words with Friends. It was just a blast watching this revolution take off of mobile gaming with the advent of the iPhone and everything else at the same time. Then six years ago, this summer, next month actually will be my sixth year. They call it a carrotversary at Instacart. But I was brought on to sort of build the communications function at Instacart. I’ve built these teams at early-stage companies for the last really 20 years. It was a very special product, one that I used so much in my life already. I was a new mom at the time. I have now an eight-year-old and a four-year-old. But then my daughter was quite young, two-year-old. I just was using it, the product, the grocery delivery, the access and the convenience and the time-saving. It just really spoke to me. I just had this feeling that it would be an inevitability, and to be able to go in and help realize the founder’s vision and then scale that. I was raised by my mom and she worked two, or three jobs, and I just imagine if she hadn’t had to rush home from work and go to Lucky’s off of Spola Road and do the grocery shopping in a hurried way. I know you grew up in Queens, so maybe that was the stop and shop for you.

John: That’s right.

Dani: But remember our parents frantically figuring out dinner. If my mom had this product, what Instacart does for so many families, that just connected with me in a really real way. It’s been a real ride and a journey in these last few years. A lot in the world has happened. To be kind of front row to a lot of that on the food side, on the access side, was quite special. That’s a little bit about my journey.

John: Now, in those six years, that’s fascinating. I love it that how you really believe, almost it goes back to like Warren Buffett’s thesis on business. He invests in companies that he enjoys their products. See’s Candy, Coca-Cola, Gillette. He uses them all. He invests in them. The same thing with you. You saw that you were using this great new brand in your own life. How relevant and how it became a necessity as a young mom. Boy, you called that right. I mean, I know Instacart now is bigger than 3 billion in revenue and what you have almost 3,500 employees. How big was it relatively speaking when you joined six years ago?

Dani: Yeah. It’s a great question. It was about 800 employees.

John: Wow.

Dani: That was about the size that I joined at Zynga as well. It’s really interesting. There’s this tipping point. I was talking to someone about this earlier this week. There’s a tipping point where you might sit down with a founder or a CEO and they have an idea for a thing, or maybe that thing is taking off. But with Instacart, what was so interesting is, I literally believe I might be the biggest orderer in the company. I mean, I’m a maniac with my orders because it’s not just grocery. It’s PetSmart, it’s Sephora, it’s Target. I mean, it’s just altering convenience, right?

John: Right.

Dani: But I just remember this point where you realize it’s not so big that everybody’s using it yet. There’s impact to be made. There’s growth to unlock. You can really affect change as a leader and partner with a CEO or a founder. But it’s taken off enough to where you believe it’s probably inevitable that the industry is going to go that way or the company is going to be successful. Then what a special thing if you’ve called that right and you have enough conviction and the CEO’s view and the founder’s vision, you can really hit some magic. I just really feel like I won the job lottery in Instacart because I just felt like families would love this in a really special way. Then COVID hit and there was no turning back. It was a really interesting time and that happened quite quickly in my tenure. But wow, what a magical thing for storytellers or impact leaders to be working on products that they know and can see in their own life are making a change. It’s very special.

John: I’m not a private equity guy, but if I was, I’d say, “I want to hire Dani just to be my person to put some entrepreneurs in front of because she sort of has the nose of who’s about to break out and who’s not.” [inaudible].

Dani: Yes. I mean, there’s no crystal ball to any of this, but I will say, if you’re in the job that I have, deep conviction makes it so much easier to navigate those hard days because this job is absolute chaos, right? We try to be predictable. We try to have a strategy. We try to be proactive, but inevitably stuff just adds chaos. If you really do believe deeply in your bones that the mission, and for us, it’s create a world where people have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together, it’s hard to go wrong when access is your anchor. It’s an amazing thing when that all clicks together.

John: [inaudible]. But you’ve picked some great brands and it comes down, when they ask why Jordan is so great or why Tiger Woods was so great or any of the great ones, Brady, besides the 10,000 hours, it comes down to that pattern recognition, and you have that ability to see the pattern recognition in terms of the arc and what’s about to break. I’ll tell you what, that’s a heck of an exciting skill and a great skill to have as a superpower, actually. It’s truly a superpower.

Dani: I mean, well, that’s very generous of you to say. I just feel lucky and can’t always get it right, but we’re doing our best over here.

John: Go back to what you just said, because I want to review that. Your mission at Instacart is to create a world where everyone has access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it. Explain that, like unpack that for our listeners and viewers a little bit, please.

Dani: Yeah. I mean, with access as an anchor, we think about this in the biggest terms, which is that Instacart is a consumer marketplace. We have consumers that count on us every single day to bring the retailers they know and love and trust into their homes. We deliver those groceries and goods through our shoppers who are amazing. There’s 600,000 of them that are shopping on behalf of consumers. Retailers rely on us to make sure that the goods and groceries they’re selling reach the consumer in really easy ways. Then advertisers and CPGs count on us to help them build out their businesses in really unique ways. I mean, at its fundamental core, Instacart’s the leading grocery technology company in North America, and there’s 1,400 retailers that count on us. Everyone from Kroger to Costco, everywhere, Stop and Shop Lucky’s, everywhere in between, the smallest locals and the biggest nationals. With that kind of scale across 80,000 stores where we deliver, it basically means we can access 95% of all U.S. households with fresh food in two hours, which is shocking. I mean, that’s not “I forgot the ketchup convenience store delivery.” This is bags of fresh food to anyone, anywhere, basically, right? It’s a pretty special thing. I think for us, people really counted on and relied on Instacart in the early days because it was helping bring groceries online and reach more consumers. It was like the last industry to be digitized, right? Like, how long have we been buying books and music and clothes online? But grocery coming online is a relatively new thing. It wasn’t until Instacart that that became more mainstream and easy. For us, the real turning point was COVID because overnight millions of people were homebound, and we went from a convenience to an essential service lightning speed.

John: Right.

Dani: Our shoppers stepped up, and we brought on, this is just a crazy stat. I have to really relive this because it felt so intense at the time.

John: Yeah.

Dani: We brought on 300,000 new shoppers in two weeks to meet the COVID demand. We scaled the company five times in five weeks. That is crazy, like jaw-dropping, but crazier to imagine people like you or me or our teams doing it from their dining room, from their garages, because we weren’t in the office either, right? You’re talking about becoming a supply chain overnight, no notice, right? Just recognized that this was the all-in moment where people were counting on us. I mean, if that doesn’t deeply connect you to this mission, nothing will. It was the resolve that we saw, right?

John: Well, that’s fascinating because you really became the great democratizer of food access then.

Dani: Yes.

John: But then, I mean, as a CEO and a co-founder of a brand, I’m always fascinated by, and that kind of scaling never has to happen in that kind of truncated period. How did the wheels not come off? I mean, what was the [inaudible]?

Dani: No. It’s a great question. I mean, I was lucky enough to be able to lead our COVID response in partnership with so much of our management team and our engineers. To scale it that fast and never have what we call a hard down, where literally it stopped working, right? It never happened. We always were operable, right? Every other service and they’re not a lot like ours, but the ones that are similar, their delivery was days. Like, we were the only way people were getting milk, toilet paper, and the basics. What was really interesting about COVID is you kind of learn the things that you thought were impossible when it’s absolute dire straits. All of a sudden, doors open, and collaboration happens, and the speed of innovation, you don’t have a choice. You’ve got to do it, right? Because people are on the line needing what you’ve got. One of the biggest things coming out of that dark, intense time, was this bright light of innovation, speed, and collaboration with people outside of our industry. An example is it was very hard for us to bring online the SNAP food stamps program, meaning so many families, tens of millions of families, get their groceries and pay for them with federal funding through the SNAP program. People talk about this as food stamps, but it actually wasn’t online a few years ago. You had to be physically in the grocery store. But through COVID, we were able to traverse all this red tape, approval from the USDA, retailer by retailer, state by state, the slowest process you can imagine, we could cut through a lot of that really fast because it was so dire. We got online a nationally scaled SNAP program that was modernized, and we became the biggest e-commerce platform to offer SNAP as a method of payments for groceries in all 50 states and D.C. This happened last year. We hit this big milestone. It was that innovation which changed the demographic of Instacart. Before, Instacart was more of a convenience service. It was harder maybe to get the groceries and have them in an affordable way. But with SNAP, tens of millions of families could now not have to choose between transportation or pick up at daycare or that second job like my mom. It could come right to them, and they could use their SNAP dollars. It was through COVID that we saw what was possible in the way of access for people. That opened up an entirely new opportunity for us to really do a lot of good.

John: Wow. I didn’t realize you went to that next level. Really, as you said, the first tranche was you became the great equalizer. Then with the addition of that stamp program that had never been online before, then you became the great democratizer of [inaudible]

Dani: Yes.

John: Wow.

Dani: I mean, access has so many dimensions, right? It’s to get something to you quickly, conveniently, but also affordably. Through the SNAP innovation, that’s really what led us to, I think, Fiji’s really our CEO, Fiji Simo, who was at META for 10 years and then became our CEO three years ago this summer. It was her vision, even bigger than access and democracy, is what role can we play and talk about impact in the future of healthcare? Because we’re now food and supply chain for millions and millions of households. As this movement was happening, this is, again, in the way of impact of food as medicine, of the future of healthcare, and how good food and nutritious food in your body creates healthier outcomes. We know that now. That’s not a controversial statement. But it was Fiji’s instinct and vision to take what we learned early days in terms of the technology we had built and the access and the affordability, and now turn it into this way that we could actually create healthier outcomes for people, partnering with city government, the federal government, insurers, big employers, and create this pretty amazing initiative in Instacart Health. That is, it really is kind of the next frontier of where impact is possible, we think, at real scale. I mean, I could talk a bit about that, but it is a really exciting place to be in terms of the scale we operate and where we believe we can do even more good.

John: I want to talk about that in a second for our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us. We’ve got Dani Dudeck with us today. She’s the Chief Corporate Affairs Officer at Instacart. To find Dani and her colleagues and all the impact and important work they do, please go to www.instacart.com or instacart.com/company/impact. We’ll put all the different links in the show notes today, so you don’t have to worry about writing them down. They’ll be in the show notes. Dani, talk a little bit about impact. You oversee the Instacart’s impact programs. What does impact mean? Like, impact can mean anything. It could be narrow, it could be broad. Brands treat it differently now, and everyone is trying their best to not only earn a paycheck, but actually make the world a better place now and make a paycheck and make a difference. Where does impact mean at Instacart? Talk a little bit about your overseeing of the impact missions there.

Dani: Sure. Maybe I’ll start with my role and how we sort of do this work, our operating philosophy on how we pursue impact, because I think it is quite distinct compared to how others are doing it. Then we can talk a little bit about the pieces of impact at Instacart. I mean, in my role as Chief Corporate Affairs Officer, I oversee communications, public affairs, the social impact work, and we really do see all those things working together to be a strategic advantage for Instacart. It’s not a nice-to-have, it is not insurance, it’s not a bolt-on. It is woven into the strategy of the company and deeply connected to this mission to create a world where people have access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. I think it has to start, I mean, like with everything, tone starts at the top. Our CEO, Fiji Simo, is so connected to this vision and mission. But importantly, the way that we do this work is to be as commercially-minded as we are purpose-driven. What I mean by that is, to us, this isn’t CSR in a silo or social impact on an island. Being commercially-minded first means that we’re focused on building we’re a newly public company, so this is important for a lot of reasons. But it’s important that we do this work in a way that scales and is sustainable. I mean sustainable as in profitable, growing and scalable. Because the more sustainable and commercially-minded our perspective, the more good we can do at scale. Definitely purpose-driven, and that’s woven into this mission where access is our anchor. But we have to be very balanced to pursue this commercially-minded or it becomes this sort of nice-to-have. The industry has moved, I think, from donation or CSR on an island because especially in tougher economic climates, you can’t weather these storms always as a business, right? If it’s a commercially-minded view, the business scales and is successful, and you can do so much more good. That’s the how we do this work. Now, maybe how impact is thought about at Instacart? I mean it’s a few really big buckets. We’ve talked about some, but I’ll say one is the food access piece, right? It is about making sure that families at every kind of value orientation, location, demographic can count on us to bring them what they need from retailers they love. That’s food access and that is…

John: I want to pause you. Is that in every zip code in the United States?

Dani: It’s 95% of all U.S. households, so yeah, virtually.

John: [inaudible]. Great. Okay.

Dani: Yeah. But it’s a good question because this isn’t a luxury for the coasts. This is virtually every zip code in North America, truly. This food access piece, right?

John: Right.

Dani: This is about bringing more nutritious food into the home and doing it in a way that never feels clinical or preachy, but meets people where they are, right? We can get into that in a little bit more detail around Instacart Health. But food access is one dimension of our impact.

John: Got it.

Dani: The second is economic empowerment. I mentioned we have 600,000 shoppers who count on us for flexible earnings that they can tuck in as sort of extra income. These 600,000 shoppers, and through COVID were people who got furloughed from their jobs and laid off at scale, but they could count on us to jump on the platform and earn quickly to supplement their income. This economic empowerment aspect of our impact is really measurable. We just released our first ever Instacart economic impact report, which showed that Instacart’s generated over $15 billion with a B in earnings for shoppers in our tenure and more than $8 billion in retailer revenue and real grocery jobs and store clerks and people with this Instacart economy, more traffic in grocery stores, more shoppers helping consumers get what they need. This economic empowerment, that’s a very real thing. That’s kind of the second piece of our impact. Then the third piece, which is further out, this is kind of how we think about the 10-year vision and arc, is the impact that Instacart can make on food systems and broader sustainability. Now, you’re talking about, so if you’re the supply chain, as we talked about earlier, what role can you have in the full stack of how food is grown, manufactured, delivered from point A to point B, and finding its way on the front door of consumers? When you think about the environment and broader sustainability, and the number one thing we can do proactively to reverse some of the sort of climate crisis is food systems. That is one of the biggest levers, if not the biggest.

John: Right.

Dani: If we could actually play a small part in streamlining those logistics, in thinking about the supply chain in unique ways, and using our data to unlock that, it is a really powerful way that we believe we can make an impact. That’s further out. Really, it’s food access, economic empowerment, and then kind of supply chain and environment. It’s a really interesting proposition.

John: It is, but it makes so much logical sequential sense, because as you said, at your core base mission, the democratization of food access itself, just what you do every day as a business, is already making a huge impact. Secondly, the job creation and economic opportunities you’ve created for those 600,000 shoppers is, again, a huge impact on society as a whole in the United States. Then third, like you said, is all the other environmental and other supply chain opportunities that you have to improve supply chain issues with regards to all the food that you sell and the logistics that you also help manage. I think it makes so much sequential sense. Did you oversee this first economic impact report that was published?

Dani: We did. We worked with a third-party kind of research firm to truly understand retailer, region, state by state, and just understand these trends. It’s the second time we’ve done it. To just have this recurring data-driven view on the impact we’re making, real dollars and cents, it’s remarkable. It’s really inspiring for our teams.

John: Sure.

Dani: Especially, I think, of course, we’re newly public, and we’re really focused on kind of the commercial opportunity where we have, we play in the biggest grocery market on the planet. It’s a trillion-dollar industry, groceries in the U.S. But the mission we’re on and the good we can do is just undeniably inspiring. It’s, we’re very committed to telling that story.

John: I love it. You talked about the data, because like you said, you have so much access to that. First of all, is that economic impact report, is that now going to become an annual event?

Dani: I mean, it’s definitely regular. Maybe every couple of years, but yeah, in the neighborhood [inaudible].

John: Got it. Will that live on your Instacart website in perpetuity?

Dani: Yep. You can find it on the company website within our newsroom. Yeah.

John: Got it. Okay. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the impact report. I want our listeners and viewers to have easy access to it. I think they’ll find it fascinating. But as you said, let’s talk about the data.

Dani: Yes.

John: One thing, there’s not a morning, Dani, that you can wake up anymore and either open up or read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, or turn on Bloomberg or CNBC where we’re not hearing about this, how do we call it in a kind way, the hype cycle of AI.

Dani: Right.

John: I mean that in a very kind way because it’s going to change the world in so many ways. How does AI with the data that you have interrelate, and what does that mean for as you see things with your leadership team at Instacart, and how you’re going to make adjustments, changes, and evolutions in the future?

Dani: Great. I love this question. I think let’s start with data and then we’ll get into AI. What’s so unique about Instacart? It’s a fun fact that not a lot of people know. We have the world’s largest grocery catalog, which means, think of a grocer that sits sort of regionally across a few states, or maybe even has a national footprint on the biggest side of things. They’re only seeing their own inventory. They’re only seeing their own data. But because we have this aerial view of North America, grocery, and retail, we are kind of the tie that binds. We can see trends out of stocks and insights. We can see what people are searching for, what they’re buying, what they’re cooking, what they’re reordering. That kind of trend data is really interesting. Think about it through the lens of food waste. If we could report back, anonymized of course, but report back to CPG advertisers, farmers even, of what people are eating or not eating, they would maybe think about their manufacturing and supply chain through the lens of manufacturing what people are wanting rather than what they think they’re wanting. Then all of a sudden we’re reducing food waste because we know what the consumption data and patterns look like. Through COVID, we were the out-of-stock go-to. We knew when the chicken noodle soup off the shelves was depleted. We knew where the toilet paper was needing to be replenished. I mean, it was incredible. When we all lived through the baby formula shortage, we supported the White House’s effort to bring emergency relief baby formula because we could see, aerial view, what counties needed it the most so that they could direct their emergency supply. I mean, it’s just fascinating when you look at the power of that. The data itself is really interesting and a lot of opportunity [inaudible]

John: I want to pause that out a little bit, Dani. Really, it’s even probably the best and most comprehensive data, because as you said, top of the show, you represent 14,000 or so retailers. You’re a retailer agnostic.

Dani: Correct. That’s right.

John: The macro data is even much clearer and more compelling than if we were just talking about one or more of these retailers. If they were on the show today, they have good data, but yours is much more comprehensive because it covers so many sectors in all that retail. Truly, your data is highly valuable, I can imagine, besides your own leadership team, and many others as well.

Dani: That’s right. It’s a really exciting thing to be able to sort of see things aerially at this view and then figure out how to make an impact with that technology. That’s really what we’re focused on. Then on the AI side, it’s a great question that you asked about sort of what does AI mean to, well, impact and just the broader sectors and industries. I think we’re lucky enough to be led by Fiji, our CEO, and I’ve worked for CEOs and founders for 20 years, and she is one in a billion, truly. She’s so pragmatic as a technologist. The reason why that’s so important is she’s just not interested in building technology because it’s shiny or in vogue. She really wants technology and products and platforms to solve real-world problems for real-world people. The AI conversation for us comes back to the kitchen table. It is not sort of a sci-fi what-if scenario. For us, it’s how we leverage our data in a super simple, pragmatic way and solve problems for people using our technology? To give you an example of that, we’ve partnered with OpenAI and have a chat GPT plugin and a feature running across the Instacart Marketplace called Ask Instacart. You could literally take your phone and ask the Instacart Marketplace, we’ll talk about health in a minute, but let’s say you’re a diabetes patient. You could say and ask it, I’m looking for a low-carb meal to feed a family of four, kid-friendly for under eight bucks a person. What would populate into your marketplace are ingredients that meet that search query, right? Filling your cart, click, click, click by the retailers you trust. Your cart’s now filled with those ingredients for what you need to make, because this dinner dilemma is the single, talk about the sort of, the great kind of democracy of problems, the dinner dilemma for every family, three o’clock, nobody knows what they’re cooking, right? Or what they’re eating. [inaudible]…

John: They’re short on time.

Dani: That’s right.

John: Right.

Dani: But if you could talk and ask Instacart that, and then what we’ve done is we give you the ingredients that popped up in the marketplace, you click to add to cart, and it’s at your front door inside 30 minutes. I mean, now you’ve got this magical loop powered by AI that just is the most pragmatic application you could imagine, right? One thing I think is just true about the broader AI discussion is we’re talking about scenarios, we’re talking about regulation, we’re talking about kind of standards, and that is so critical, but we also can’t lose sight of the regular people, the families whose lives could be made better by this technology. For us, we bring it back to the kitchen table, it’s what’s for dinner, and it goes from asking a question to your front door in 30 minutes, and that is just magic. We think about it that way, we think about it through the problems it will solve. We’re lucky to have the meat and potatoes business, and we just apply that to the tech we’re innovating on.

John: Got it. AI’s application is one consumer-facing. When did you launch that tool?

Dani: It’s been live for, let’s see, almost a year, and it’s-

John: Talk about the adoption. What’s the adoption been like of that?

Dani: I mean, people love it because it is so practical, right? I think we’ve only started to see the consumer adoption. I know everybody’s excited with how loud the conversation is, and how viral it seems, right? There are a lot of players in this space, but I think it’s going to be eye-popping when it gets really practical for people and start solving problems that where time sucks in their lives. I think Fiji has a really interesting view, again, our CEO, who is about, what is the problem? Then let’s use technology to solve that, not let’s ship a bunch of technology and hope we solve problems, right? We’re working backward in a really pragmatic way. Yeah.

John: As you say, that’s such a practical approach to technology instead of building on the field of dreams technology approach, building hope that other people hope that your client base will come. You’re really answering what your client base wants and needs with technology. Let’s ta–

Dani: Right. Sometimes you end up… I’d love to talk for a minute about health. I mean, it’s one of the examples-

John: I’m going to go into health in a second, but I want to ask you a question, one more question about AI, Dani. I’m excited about AI.

Dani: Let’s do it.

John: I’m up for fun. Like say, I’m launching Johnny’s vegan ice cream and it’s going to be the greatest vegan ice cream and I want to support vegan ice cream with a dozen shops across the country, and a dozen retail shops. What I would…part of also what AI does with your data, then parse it into the form where I could come to you and buy data from you to say, “In what zip codes are you selling the most CPG vegan ice cream products so I could know where my marketplace might be for my retail shops?”

Dani: We are one of the most unique and successful retail-powered media platforms on the planet. If you’re Johnny’s vegan ice cream or you’re the most known brand on the planet already, the ROI that we can unlock for you is so different than anything that’s come before and emerging brands, Johnny’s vegan ice cream, you will be able to tell exactly if, not just a potential customer heard about Johnny’s vegan ice cream, but you can see it clicked and added to cart after you serve them a certain ad or after you made them a certain promo and we can be really nuanced and detailed about that. Again, it all comes back to data to your point and having this catalog. Technology is powering this whole new world where we can really measure ROI, not just wandering in the store, wondering if your shelf display lands with a consumer, but literally like measuring the click add to cart and the reorder data that is just to the pin with accuracy. It’s pretty amazing.

John: You’re taking me even much more upstream. You’re really helping me even more with the data. Wow.

Dani: Right. It’s amazing.

John: [inaudible]. Okay. I interrupted you and I want to definitely go into this very important topic. Again, for our listeners and viewers who’ve just joined us, we’ve got Dani Dudeck with us today. She’s a chief corporate affairs officer at Instacart. To find Dani and all of her colleagues at Instacart and the important and impactful work they’re doing, please go to www.instacart.com. Let’s talk about healthcare. Let’s talk about the impact initiatives that you’re doing with Instacart Health and what does that means to Instacart with regards to Instacart Health?

Dani: I mean, I think we’ve talked a lot about this access anchor that really binds everything we do at Instacart. But one of the things that we’ve really seen over the last 11 years is that health starts at home. There’s just no question and maybe more literally in the kitchen. As we found ourselves where food and family meet, this unique intersection, this observation and vision that Fiji had coming off of COVID where we were able to really innovate on the access dimension and the affordability piece that families were counting on us for the food and groceries they needed. We have this thesis that if we can work with the healthcare ecosystem, payers, providers, nonprofits, think insurers, big hospitals, big employers, city governments, and federal government, we can bring more nutritious food into the home. We can help keep people healthier because we’re helping them make better choices and we can drive down healthcare costs because if people are healthier, right? They’re getting sick less. They’re spending less on their hospital bills. They’re pressurizing the insurance and healthcare systems less, right? It makes sense that that thesis would be true. What we did is in 2022, we were working on the launch of Instacart Health because we were saying, “Look, if SNAP alone and the food stamps coming online opened up that much more access for families, what else can we do to really help health at extreme scale.” Right? At the same time, the administration, and the White House were working on their own national strategy for hunger, nutrition, and health. That’s a really big deal when any administration rings the bell on a topic. They were putting together this very unique conference. The last time this conference happened was 50 years ago. Actually, food stamps came out of that conference.

John: Wow.

Dani: This was a historic moment and we were working on the launch of Instacart Health at the time. We started our, we always are in conversations with policymakers at every level. We were talking to the White House about this and we decided to time our launch with their conference and all of it kind of knitted together to create this big moment where the private sector woke up a little bit and the public sector woke up a little bit and said, “We should be naming that food is medicine.” Right? Food creates more opportunities to keep people healthy given the chronic issues we have in this country, given how wealthy a nation we are but how acute our food security issues are. These things make no sense. All of us together should be around the table and more aggressively work to solve this problem.

John: Right.

Dani: We decided to put our time and our energy and our money where our mouth is and think about Instacart and our products and our partnerships and our policy and our technology as a way to keep people healthier. Instacart Health has been several years in the making and it’s this amazing partnership between nonprofits and government and our retailers to just keep people healthier. I’ll give you an example of a very basic consumer experience that just wasn’t possible a few years ago. Let’s say you, God forbid, had to have surgery at a hospital and you were discharged, right? You’re driving home from this procedure and you pull up to your house in Fresno and waiting for you on your front door are bags of groceries. These groceries were prescribed and curated by your doctor to aid in your recovery. They were sent within minutes by Instacart straight to your front door and they’re covered by your insurance, subsidized by your insurance. That loop of food as medicine and the programs that we could help scale and spearhead is just magic and it’s a technology that’s powering that. We talk about food access and economic opportunity, but just to literally help aid in someone’s recovery and keep their family healthier. The groceries are coming from a retailer that you love. It’s not a hospital box you don’t recognize. Do you know what I mean? We’re meeting you where you are. You’re familiar with it. It doesn’t feel medical. It just feels like personal, right?

John: Wow. This is brilliant. When did you launch this and how has the adoption of this been?

Dani: It’s been fantastic. We launched it in 2022, so two years ago. It’s a huge, exciting opportunity to connect literally insurers and their patients, hospitals, and doctors. I mean, doctors can now prescribe food as easily as they can prescribe medication by building you as a patient, a cart on Instacart and sending it to your front door. It’s just that simple. This just wasn’t possible a few years ago. The tech is here to meet the moment and it’s all getting very real and very scaled in a really exciting way.

John: Talk about where is the pull coming from and the push coming from? Obviously, Instacart wants to see more adoption of this. Now, I’ve never heard of this and I’m very much into health and healthcare and wellness and longevity. Where are the hospitals pushing this? Are they the first adopters, the doctors, or the patients? Who are the first movers and first adoptees on this? Where do you see future adoption coming from?

Dani: I mean, if you unpack the healthcare ecosystem, so payers, first is insurers and really making sure that insurers understand that there is an irrefutable link between people eating healthy food and them staying healthy and saving money ultimately. Now, that statement is not controversial but we didn’t have as much data collectively as we do now. We have a massive and bursting research pipeline that partners with Stanford Medicine, Cleveland Clinic, I mean, and on and on and on.

John: [inaudible].

Dani: To help in these sorts of food as medicine programs that understand the different interventions and how literally food helps people. I mean, obviously, lowers blood pressure and helps their cardiovascular health. We can now actually measure that in partnership with these academic research institutions, and hospitals and then feed that information back to the insurer. It’s clear as day. We have a partnership with Kaiser and their community health work that is not unlike that, right? This is happening and it’s with the biggest partners in North America on all sides of the healthcare industry. It feels like largely because of the administration’s leadership here people are really sitting up and trying to solve problems together in new ways.

John: So exciting. I didn’t even realize you had done that Instacart help. That’s wonderful. Dani, what’s next? You’ve been there now almost six years in a very short time. You’ve been there almost six years. What is the next two or three years look like and what’s getting you the most excited about what’s to come because obviously Instacart is a rocket ship and it’s continued to grow and grow in so many wonderful and important ways. What are you most excited about right now?

Dani: I can’t imagine there’s going to be a dull moment here ever because we’re just at the forefront of so many interesting technologies. One thing that I’m really excited about is just the advocacy work. We learned through COVID that when we advocate for something that is game-changing for families, like modernizing SNAP and food stamps that we can affect the lives of millions and millions of families. There are a few other programs like that that we believe should be modernized and need to come online. The advocacy future is a really interesting one in the way of impact. That is literally to say WIC. The sort of women, infants, and children program, the federal funding where so many, 50% of all babies born in the US are WIC families, WIC babies and that federal program is not online today. You, if you’re a mom and you are relying on WIC resources, you have to go and stand in line to get the formula you need to feed your baby. That to me, both my babies were formula babies and I just can’t imagine the difference in a birth mom to be able to get that formula, subsidize using their WIC dollars and at their front door in minutes. The game change of that for them. I mean, talk about ease and like depressurizing and giving them the support that they need. We’re advocating to modernize WIC nationally and to make sure families and moms have what they need. That would be huge. We’re really excited about that.

John: Having the fact that you’ve already created the paradigm of how to take something that’s his legacy and historically antiquated and put it online the way you did with the food stamp program, is the government listening to you? Do they believe that you’re the right one so then to accomplish this? Because it sounds like it to me on its face that you should be running this and getting this done as soon as possible. Because like you said, again, it will democratize access which is such a wonderful and important thing for us to continue to do in this country when it comes to these important issues.

Dani: They are. They’re doing amazing work. I mean, we’re very encouraged by how the tone feels and where we see this going. I’m crossing all my fingers and we’re advocating with all of our breath and energy to try and make that happen. That’s the advocacy side. That’s just one example, but there are a lot of really heartwarming and high-impact projects. Then I think AI is another area of just extreme innovation and excitement. Again, we bring AI back to where technology can solve real problems for real people. That’ll be the kitchen table for us, but the ease of solving what seems like an easy question, “What’s for dinner?” but leveraging the technology against your taste preferences, my taste preferences, what your spouse and partner want to eat, what my kids will eat. I mean, to parse through all that and make it so simple, that is just really exciting. Yeah. We’re focused on the technology, but making it real for people. Of course, the advocacy and true impact at scale.

John: Dani, we talked a little bit offline before we went live here about donations. Can you give the link for Instacart donations and we’ll put that also in our show notes?

Dani: Sure. We have this really interesting product called Community Carts. Community Carts is how we solve this donation dilemma that food banks have. In a post-COVID world, there’s a drought with donations and food banks aren’t getting what they need. Or if they are getting donations, they’re not getting the healthiest, most nutritious, most sort of good-for-you donations. What we’ve done is created, think of it as these Community Carts are like food bank wishlists. The link quite literally is instacart.com/donate. What you can do is it will know your zip code. It will populate the food banks closest to you. It will show you the food bank carts. These are the things they need. They need tuna fish. They need peanut butter. They don’t need the snacks, right? You can fill out their wishlist and donate and then send it right to their front door using Instacart. The thing that is so important right now too is the school’s out, right? It’s almost summer for most people. My kids have another week or two, but the summer is the hungriest time for families because school meals aren’t provided. You’ve got this really hard time and these resources like our food bank community cart projects where you can send food right to your community food bank and help all those families in need, so instacart.com/donate. It’s incredibly local and it’s sending exactly what they need, which is a really special thing.

John: Wow. That itself is just…Well, we’ll put a link to that in our show notes and that’s just another huge impact that you and your colleagues are making at Instacart. Dani, I’ve been more than impressed, blown away, and inspired by everything you said today. I didn’t know most of it. I bet most of our listeners and viewers didn’t either. Thank you for illuminating these very important initiatives and the impact that you and your colleagues are doing at Instacart. You’re always welcome back on the Impact Podcast to share any new stuff and to continue this amazing journey that you’re on at Instacart. For our listeners and viewers to find Dani and her colleagues, please go to www.instacart.com. We’ll put all of the other links in the show notes. Dani, thanks for your time today, but more importantly, thank you and your colleagues at Instacart for making the great impact that you’re making on this planet and making the world ultimately a better place.

Dani: Thank you so much, John. It was good to chat with you. I appreciate it. Talk to you later.

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• Instacart’s Impact page: https://www.instacart.com/impact
• Instacart’s food bank donation tool: https://www.instacart.com/donate
• Instacart’s economic impact report: https://www.instacart.com/company/static/pdfs/economic-impact-2023.pdf