An iPhone app, three Bay Area towns and a Y Combinator batch.

Instacart was started in June 2012 by Apoorva Mehta, a former supply-chain engineer at Amazon. TechCrunch, introducing the company on 1 August 2012, described it as a Y Combinator-backed start-up that was then only a mobile app, available on the iPhone and by invitation, delivering groceries bought from local stores in San Francisco, Mountain View and Palo Alto. Customers tapped to order, and the company’s own delivery staff picked up the items from nearby shops and brought them to a home or office. Mehta told TechCrunch that he wanted the app eventually to deliver almost anything, but that groceries were the starting point.

English Wikipedia adds the story of how the company got into Y Combinator. Mehta missed the application deadline, it says, and won a meeting by using the Instacart app to send a six-pack of beer from San Francisco’s 21st Amendment Brewery to one of the programme’s partners; the company joined the summer 2012 batch. Wikipedia names Max Mullen and Brandon Leonardo as co-founders alongside Mehta, and says Y Combinator helped him raise early money and introduced him to them.

The legal entity behind the brand has a different name. Wikipedia records the company as Maplebear Inc., doing business as Instacart, with its headquarters in San Francisco and a service that operates in the United States and Canada through a website and mobile app. Customers order from participating retailers and a personal shopper picks, packs and delivers the order.

The service reached Canada in November 2017, Wikipedia says, initially through a partnership with the grocer Loblaw in Toronto and Vancouver. It also records that the annual membership introduced in August 2013 as Instacart Express was renamed Instacart+ in June 2022, when new family-sharing features were added.

From founder-led start-up to a Nasdaq company.

Leadership changed hands twice in the 2020s. Wikipedia records that Fidji Simo, previously head of the Facebook app at Meta, became chief executive in July 2021, while Mehta moved to executive chairman, and that in July 2022 Simo was named to succeed him as chair once the company went public. TechCrunch reported on 7 May 2025 that Simo would join OpenAI to lead its applications business, that she had helped take Instacart public in 2023, and that she would stay on as chair of the Instacart board. Wikipedia says the company named its business chief, Chris Rogers, as the next chief executive, and that he took up the post on 15 August 2025.

The public listing came in September 2023, when, according to Wikipedia, the company’s shares opened on Nasdaq under the ticker CART. Wikipedia says Mehta left the company after it went public. Maplebear has traded on Nasdaq since 2023, and the company continues to trade with customers as Instacart.

The business widened beyond the grocery aisle in the same period, and the company presented the 2022 rebrand as a reflection of that evolution. Progressive Grocer, in a report by Emily Crowe republished by Canadian Grocer on 22 March 2022, said the company now considered itself “grocery-first, but not grocery only”, and that it had grown to include delivery of home goods, beauty, pharmacy, electronics, office supplies and hardware, and worked closely with brands and retailers. Marketing Dive reported on 17 March 2022 that the refresh placed more emphasis on the company’s retail partnerships, with new creative calling attention to partners such as CVS and Publix.

Wikipedia also records that in March 2022 the company introduced the Instacart Platform, a set of digital tools for retailers covering advertising, delivery and inventory, and that it bought the smart shopping-cart maker Caper AI in 2021.

Design and documentation.

A delivery app’s brand lives in more places than its home screen. The app icon is the smallest and most-repeated version of the identity: a square tile that has to read at thumbnail size beside dozens of others, so it usually reduces the brand to one letter, one symbol or one flat field of colour. Inside the app, that same colour tends to carry buttons, map pins and order-status screens, which is why delivery identities lean on a single owned hue rather than a full palette.

Off the phone, the brand travels with the courier. Insulated bags, backpacks and jackets turn the mark into street signage, and they are often seen from behind, in motion and in poor light, so a bold wordmark or symbol on a plain ground works better than fine detail. Restaurants add a third layer: window and door decals, counter stickers and tablet stands that tell passers-by which apps a shop takes orders from.

For a designer, the useful lesson is consistency across scale — the same colour and symbol should hold up on a phone icon, a courier bag and a shopfront sticker.

The carrot that became an arrow.

The carrot was Instacart’s symbol before 2022, and the March 2022 refresh kept it rather than replacing it. Progressive Grocer reported that the new identity retained the carrot graphic but brought a new logo, wordmark, typography and colour, and that the company said the original carrot had been turned into a flexible symbol for “shop” and “savor”, terms it described as part of its value proposition. Marketing Dive described the new mark in detail: bolder lettering in a deep green, only the top part of the orange carrot shown, and the fronds drawn in a lighter green so that they read as an arrow, a shape that could be used flexibly across channels.

The arrow was meant to move. Marketing Dive said the launch work used animation to show the carrot’s fronds bouncing through the products Instacart delivers, and another animation had the fronds clicking through a series of the company’s major retail partners. Progressive Grocer described the new palette as a nod to food and reported its colours as of Kale green, Turmeric yellow and Guava pink, and said the identity would appear in the consumer and shopper apps, the app stores, advertising products, retail and enterprise tools, the corporate website, email, social channels, paid media and events.

The agency Wolff Olins says it developed the identity in close collaboration with Instacart’s leadership, brand team and creative studio. In its case study the agency says it built the work around an ethos it calls “Shop+Savor”, that the streamlined carrot top doubles as an arrow to show that a cart is for more than food, and that Instacart implemented the identity in 2022. Wolff Olins also says it helped the company build a creative team and branded the Instacart+ membership.

For a design guide, Instacart shows how a company can keep a familiar symbol through a redesign while redrawing it to stand for a wider offer, with the carrot cropped and its green top turned into an arrow. Compare it with DoorDash and Uber Eats, two other app brands built around delivery. For this guide we use kale green, carrot orange and turmeric yellow with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Instacart’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.