DoorDash Adds 8 Grocers as Aggregators Step Up Non-Restaurant Offerings

DoorDash is expanding its grocery selection as, across the industry, restaurant delivery services add more retailers in the leadup to Instacart going public.

The United States’ leading restaurant aggregator announced Monday (Sept. 18) the addition of eight new grocery partners — CUB, Eataly, El Super, Fiesta Mart, Lowe’s Markets, Pruett’s Food, Stater Bros. Markets and Strack & Van Til — spanning more than 550 locations to its platform.

“We’ve made significant progress in investing in long-term partnerships with grocers of all sizes, all while remaining focused on improving quality and execution,” DoorDash Vice President of New Verticals Fuad Hannon said in a statement. “The grocers announced today recognize DoorDash as a source of incremental growth, accelerating what we believe to be the fastest-growing platform for grocery in North America.”

Additionally, DoorDash is expanding its alcoholic beverage selection in an effort to drive adoption. Along with the CUB grocery stores now on the delivery platform, it is also adding more than 30 Cub Wine & Spirits and Cub Liquor locations.

In a separate but related announcement also issued Monday, DoorDash said it has expanded its alcoholic beverage delivery partnership with discount supermarket chain Aldi to span more than 1,200 locations in 21 states.

“On DoorDash, adding alcohol may increase grocers’ average order value by up to 30%. Order values for U.S. convenience orders were on average over 50% higher when alcohol was added,” Hannon stated. “We’ve worked hard to build a trusted alcohol ordering and delivery experience.”

The move comes as, across the restaurant aggregator industry, players are expanding their grocery selections. On Wednesday (Sept. 13), Uber Eats said it was adding more than 190 grocery stores owned by The Save Mart Companies to its marketplace, and the following day, the company announced the addition of the addition of all 161 locations of The Fresh Market.

These moves come as rival Instacart, the leading grocery aggregator, prepares to go public via an initial public offering (IPO).

PYMNTS Intelligence finds that online grocery makes up a relatively small portion of the total grocery market, but that share is growing. The study “Tracking the Digital Payments Takeover: Catching the Coming eCommerce Wave,” created in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, which drew from a census-balanced survey of nearly 2,700 U.S. consumers, showed that 12% of grocery transactions occur online. Plus, the same study found that about one in three shoppers reports being very or extremely likely to increase their online grocery purchases in the next year.

Even outside competitors’ mad dash in recent months to boost their grocery presence in the leadup to Instacart’s IPO, DoorDash has been growing its grocery business significantly.

“Over the last two and a half years, we’ve built a multibillion-dollar grocery business from scratch, and it was really ready for primetime exposure,” DoorDash CEO Tony Xu told analysts on an August call. “We now have more non-restaurant stores on the platform in North America [than] any other platform. We’re growing faster than every other platform and gaining share dramatically in virtually all categories, and very specifically also in grocery.”