Instacart Uses Super Bowl LX to Spotlight New Preference Picker and In-App Quality Controls

New updates have been reported about Instacart.

Instacart is leveraging its second consecutive Super Bowl appearance to promote Preference Picker, a new in-app feature designed to tighten control over fresh-grocery quality and personalization across its marketplace. The 30-second Super Bowl LX spot, “Bananas,” directed by Spike Jonze and featuring Ben Stiller and Benson Boone, centers on how customers can specify banana ripeness, highlighting Instacart’s broader Grocery Quality Controls suite that already includes Inventory Check, detailed Shopper Notes, replacement preferences, AI-driven Smart Backup, and Second Store Check. The campaign, backed by a director’s cut and pre-game teaser content in the U.S. and Canada, reflects a continued push to deepen customer engagement and brand differentiation following what the company describes as outsized business impact from last year’s Big Game campaign. Preference Picker is now available across most grocers on the Instacart Marketplace, and the company plans to extend the capability to other categories, such as avocado ripeness and deli meat thickness, signaling a roadmap toward increasingly granular product-level customization.

From a commercial standpoint, Instacart is pairing the brand investment with promotional partnerships to drive incremental order volume around a key demand window. Ahead of and during the game, Instacart is running limited-time, basket-building offers with major CPG partners on popular game-day foods, aligned with insights from its Snacktime Report on top-viewed and top-ordered products. Bananas—the platform’s single top-selling item, with more than 1.8 billion units delivered and over 32 million shopper notes—serve as the creative anchor that ties the new feature directly to high-frequency, high-sensitivity purchasing behavior. For executives and investors, the move underscores Instacart’s strategy to couple high-profile brand marketing with product innovation aimed at reducing quality friction, increasing customer satisfaction and retention, and capturing more share of wallet in online grocery, while creating additional surfaces for CPG collaboration and potential ad and promotional revenue growth on the Instacart Platform.