Dive Brief:

• Stop & Shop will partner with Instacart to bring same-day delivery to the chain's customers in Boston, according to The Shelby Report. A start date has not been announced.
• Shoppers can use Instacart to fill their baskets with Stop & Shop products, select a delivery window — within one hour or up to seven days in advance—and the online grocery delivery service will do the rest.
• “Instacart has always been about bringing customers’ favorite stores directly to their doors,” Nilam Ganenthiran, Instacart’s chief business officer, told The Shelby Report. “Stop & Shop is loved by its customers, and we are excited to bring added convenience to them.”

Dive Insight:

The partnership with Stop & Shop continues Instacart's aggressive push to expand its reach across the United States. The online grocery delivery company, which has expanded to Detroit and Las Vegas, among other cities, just this year, has set a goal of reaching 80% of U.S. households by 2018. What's interesting about the expansion in Boston is that Instacart is partnering with a banner operated by Ahold Delhaize, the owner of online rival and grocery delivery pioneer Peapod.

Executives at the Illinois-based Peapod have said they are willing to concede the instant delivery game to smaller players, instead focusing their attention on larger, more profitable orders. The new Instacart partnership will focus on same-day delivery, a perk that Peapod currently does not offer. In an email to Food Dive, Carrie Bienkowski, Peapod’s chief marketing officer, said other Ahold Delhaize brands have already experimented with Instacart in markets such as Giant stores in Washington, D.C.

"What we see is minimal overlap between the two customer bases indicating that our services are meeting different shopping missions and occasions," she wrote.

While Instacart and Peapod — along with AmazonFresh and FreshDirect — are routinely seen as competitors, there are times when the companies offer slightly different services that allow them to serve different niches in the online grocery delivery space. It's possible that millennials, for example, are more likely to flock to the instantaneousness of Instacart to pick up a few items, while other shoppers may gravitate to Peapod to help them with their meal planning and larger, more expansive shopping trips.

With an estimated 20% of all grocery spending — a total of around $100 billion — expected to come from online shoppers by 2025, according to the Food Marketing Institute and Nielsen, this latest announcement shows there's room for multiple players in this nascent and rapidly evolving industry.