Instacart predicts availability of 200 million grocery items every 30 minutes using machine learning

Solution:

As a quick overview of how Instacart works, customers place orders online to be fulfilled from one of our grocery retail partners. A personal shopper engaged by Instacart picks items in the store and delivers them in as little as an hour. They have millions of grocery products listed on their website. Each product at a particular store is defined as an “item” and they want to know the availability of each item.

They currently use item availability predictions in many ways across the product. One such use case is to decide items that customers are able to order. They hide items with very low availability scores and low relevance in search. They also use these predictions to route shoppers to stores with better availability of ordered items.