Choosing what you want to eat and prepare for all your daily meals can be challenging enough. What's worse is identifying the ingredients you need and finding those items out of stock. This becomes even more irritating when ordering online and learning the item is sold out. Instacart's latest tech looks to eradicate this issue. 

Also: Samsung's smart fridges can soon add items to your Instacart order

On Thursday, Instacart unveiled its new Store View and Second Store Check advancements. According to the release, these tools help customers gain a more in-depth and accurate understanding of the products on their grocery store shelves by combining Instacart's integration with retail store inventory systems and the millions of weekly orders customers place. 

Store View 

The Store View feature uses AI and computer vision to analyze footage -- taken by eligible Instacart Shoppers -- of the store shelves one aisle at a time to identify products that are in stock. What's in it for the Instacart Shopper? It's another earning opportunity for a relatively low-lift task. 

This feature will also help inform Instacart's predictive models, which use historical data to predict when an item will be back in stock. This is useful to the customer because if they place an order for the next day and the item is out of stock, the algorithm can predict whether it will be in stock by then and confirm in the morning. Store View will launch with some retailers in the upcoming weeks and expand to more US and Canada locations throughout 2025. 

Instacart also shared that in the future, its Caper Carts, AI-powered smart carts currently used for item recognition and location-based recommendations, will have outward-facing cameras that can give better and more frequent updates on store inventory. 

Second Store Check

The Second Store Check feature is simple: if an item is out of stock in one store, a second shopper at another store will be asked if it is available there. Because the other person is already at the store, the feedback can be delivered in a matter of minutes. The feature will roll out across the Instacart marketplace in the coming months. 

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