Instacart Partners With Sharebite to Target Corporate Food Spend

Instacart is targeting employers’ office snack budgets, as aggregators compete for businesses’ food spending.

On Tuesday (Dec. 12), meal benefits platform Sharebite announced a partnership with the grocery technology company, through which Sharebite clients receive a free one-year Instacart Business account, enabling snack and grocery ordering for offices.

“Our alliance with Instacart represents the coming together of two mission-driven companies focused on food access, both in the workplace, as well as in our communities,” Sharebite Co-founder and CEO Dilip Rao said in a statement. “This partnership extends our ability to deliver a world-class customer experience to our growing roster of hundreds of best-in-class corporate and enterprise clients.”

The aggregator’s Instacart Business arm touts its benefits for stocking office kitchens, with popular items including fruits, bottled water, paper towels and toilet paper.

The move comes as grocery and restaurant aggregators alike compete for employers’ meal and snack spending. Last year, for instance, DoorDash announced a partnership with co-working space provider WeWork to be the exclusive delivery provider for events therein in the U.S. and Canada. Additionally, the aggregator’s DoorDash for Corporate business offers group order capabilities for offices, expensed meals, the option to purchase DashPass as an employee benefit and more.

Meanwhile, Uber Eats has its Uber for Business arm, which provides in-office meals as well as stipends and vouchers for meals for remote employees and virtual events, in addition to gift card options and meal planning tools for employers. Grubhub, too, has its Corporate Accounts, with similar B2B solutions for group orders, individual meals for in-office or remote workers, and catering.

Indeed, there is demand for food-based office perks. In an interview earlier this year with PYMNTS, Diane Swint, chief revenue officer at business catering firm ezCater, observed that companies’ corporate catering spending has been resilient amid macroeconomic, arguing that catered meals are indispensable.

“Food at work is a business tool, and so if you think about any business that relies on things like gasoline, you still have to drive the trucks from X to Y, and you’d have to pay for that gasoline, whether the price is going up or not,” Swint said. “We see the same thing with food.”

In fact, the vast majority of consumers continue to work on site. According to the PYMNTS Intelligence study   “The ConnectedEconomy™ Monthly Series: Meet The Zillennials,” which draws from a census-balanced survey of nearly 4,000 U.S. consumers, between 85% and 91% of employees (depending on the generation) work in person at least some of the time, while fewer than two-thirds across generations do so remotely.

Additionally, digital ordering is increasingly becoming the norm across the restaurant and grocery industries. According to the survey “Consumer Interest in an Everyday App,” a PYMNTS Intelligence and PayPal collaboration, which draws on responses from more than 2,200 U.S. consumers, 60% of those who had purchased food from a restaurant in the previous month did so via connected devices at least some of the time. Plus, 601 of those who shopped for groceries did the same.