Employers
Instacart is shutting down its Caper Cart smart shopping cart business, five years after buying the startup behind it for about $350 million. Maplebear Inc., the company that operates Instacart, said in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, Oct. 26, that its board decided on Saturday, Oct. 25, to wind down Caper Cart operations, and that it expects $12 million to $17 million of the related charges to be employee termination costs.
The filing does not say how many employees are affected, and the termination-cost estimate cannot be converted into a head count. The company also did not say where affected workers are based.
The charges
Maplebear expects to record pre-tax charges of about $55 million to $80 million for the wind-down, mostly in the fourth quarter of 2026. Besides employee termination costs, the estimate includes $21 million to $36 million for terminating contractual obligations and $22 million to $27 million for impairments of long-lived assets tied to Caper Cart operations. The company said $30 million to $50 million of the charges will result in future cash spending.
The wind-down, and the charges, are expected to be substantially complete by the end of the second quarter of 2027. The company cautioned that actual expenses and their timing could differ materially from its estimates, in part because of local legal requirements in various jurisdictions. It plans to exclude the costs from adjusted EBITDA.
According to the filing, the decision was made “to re-align resources to support the Company’s strategic priorities,” and Instacart intends to reinvest any savings into “strategic growth initiatives.”
Why the carts are going away
In a statement reported by Supermarket News, Instacart said retailer adoption of Caper “has not grown quickly enough to justify continued investment,” following a review over several months of the business’s progress and the resources needed to grow it. The company said the move “does not signal a retreat from in-store technology” and that it will focus on software and data tools for grocers, including FoodStorm, Carrot Tags, In-Store Mode, Store View, Inventory Intelligence and the Store Excellence Portal. Supermarket News reported that the company did not say how the decision would affect employees, retail customers or carts already in stores.
The carts used cameras and sensors to track items placed in or removed from them, weigh produce, apply coupons and take payment, Business Insider reported. In early 2024, Instacart said it planned to roll out thousands of the carts, and then-CEO Fidji Simo said the company believed they were “going to be the future of grocery shopping,” according to the same report.
Instacart announced the Caper AI acquisition in October 2021 for about $350 million in cash and stock, TechCrunch reported at the time. Caper then had smart-cart development deals with retailers including Kroger and Wakefern in the United States, and also made a smart checkout counter.
What it means for workers
For scale, Maplebear reported about 3,600 full-time employees worldwide as of Dec. 31, 2025, in its annual report; the company has not said how many of them work on Caper. The wind-down is unrelated to the $5 million settlement announced Oct. 20 over federal allegations about Instacart’s mail-only applications for green card-sponsored jobs.
For workers in retail technology, the decision is a signal that hardware-heavy automation in grocery stores is facing a tougher return-on-investment test than software sold to the same retailers. Instacart’s own description of its next steps points to software, data and inventory tools rather than physical devices. The company has not said what will happen to carts already deployed in stores.
Sources
- Maplebear Inc., Form 8-K (Item 2.05), October 26, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579091/000157909126000050/cart-20261025.htm
- Supermarket News, “Instacart’s Caper Carts to be phased out,” October 27, 2026. https://www.supermarketnews.com/grocery-technology/instacart-s-caper-carts-to-be-phased-out
- Business Insider via Yahoo Finance, “Instacart calls it quits on technology it hailed as ‘the future of grocery shopping’,” October 26, 2026. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/instacart-calls-quits-technology-hailed-211320893.html
- TechCrunch, “Instacart acquires Caper AI, a smart cart and instant checkout startup, for $350M, as it moves deeper into physical retail tech,” October 19, 2021. https://techcrunch.com/2021/10/19/instacart-acquires-caper-ai-a-smart-cart-and-instant-checkout-startup-for-350m-as-it-moves-deeper-into-physical-retail-tech/
- Maplebear Inc., Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2025, filed February 26, 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1579091/000157909126000018/cart-20251231.htm
Featured photo: Caper smart carts lined up at ShopRite of Brookdale in Bloomfield, New Jersey, photographed Jan. 16, 2025. Photo: CmdrDan, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Cropped from the original.
