Case Study: Instacart achieves real-time inventory management and rapidly scalable operations with Confluent

Instacart Taps Confluent to Put (and Keep) Its Data in Motion During Unprecedented Growth

Instacart, the leading online grocery platform, faced unprecedented demand at the start of the COVID‑19 pandemic — what executives described as “about 10 years of growth in six weeks” — which strained customer apps, backend systems, inventory tracking, and order fulfillment. To build an elastic, always‑on, cloud‑native data infrastructure that could update inventory and support end‑to‑end orders in real time, Instacart turned to Confluent and its Confluent Cloud streaming platform.

Confluent delivered a fully managed, Kafka‑based real‑time data platform that connected disparate systems, removed operational overhead, and accelerated development. By using Confluent Cloud, Instacart rapidly scaled and onboarded hundreds of thousands of shoppers, expanded from ~1,500 to 28,000+ stores and reached over 85% of U.S. households, while improving inventory accuracy, reducing TCO, accelerating prototyping and deployments, and putting real‑time fraud detection into production within months.

Instacart

Nate Kupp

Director of Engineering