Instacart did everything it was supposed to do in the first quarter of 2026. Gross transaction value crossed $10 billion in a single quarter for the first time in the company's history, climbing 13% year over year to $10.29 billion, per the company's release. Total revenue cleared $1 billion for the first time, up 14% to $1.02 billion. Adjusted EBITDA jumped 23% to $300 million. EPS came in at $0.57, blowing past the $0.39 consensus by nearly 50%. And then the stock fell roughly 8.8% on the print, as Investing.com's earnings recap noted.
The "sell the news" reaction is a tougher signal to read than the headline number. The market did not punish Instacart for the quarter it just delivered. It punished Instacart for the quarter DoorDash announced the day before. DoorDash printed 37% GOV growth, told the Street it acquired more new grocery customers in three months than in any previous quarter, and guided Q2 GOV roughly $5 billion ahead of consensus. Investors looked at Instacart's 13% GTV growth, looked at DoorDash's 37%, and adjusted their priors on who is winning the third-party grocery race.
The competitive picture inside the print is the part that ought to worry the bull case. Instacart's gross margin compressed from 7.4% to 7.2% of GTV, per StockStory's writeup via FinancialContent, and free cash flow on a trailing-twelve-month basis fell roughly 10% year over year to $252 million. CEO Chris Rogers framed the quarter as the ninth consecutive period of double-digit GTV growth, TIKR captured the call detail, and pointed analysts at the enterprise platform business — the white-label tech that retailers like Aldi, Costco, and Wegmans use to run their own e-commerce. Advertising and other revenue grew 16%, the fastest pace since Q3 2023, per The Globe and Mail's transcript of the call.
Those are real green shoots. But "we have an enterprise business" and "ads grew 16%" are the answers a marketplace gives when growth in the core marketplace is decelerating into single digits. PYMNTS framed it bluntly: DoorDash became the volume leader in third-party grocery and retail delivery last fall and held the position through Q1, with one in two new grocery delivery customers entering the category through DoorDash. Instacart's lock on the U.S. grocery delivery cohort — the foundation of the IPO story two years ago — is no longer a lock.
The strategic question for retailers is now uncomfortably specific. If you're a grocer evaluating which third-party stack to put in front of your assortment, the case for Instacart's enterprise platform is mature, integrated, and proven. The case for DoorDash is that it's adding new shoppers faster than anyone else and the orders show up. Instacart's scale advantage in retail media is real — $286 million in ad revenue at a 2.8% take rate of GTV is a number DoorDash cannot match yet — but ad budgets follow shoppers, and shoppers, at the margin, are following DoorDash's faster onboarding and broader category mix.
Two things to watch from here. First, whether Instacart's enterprise platform can keep adding logos at the rate that supports the "we are the AWS of grocery" narrative — Aldi's exclusive deal earlier in April was a real win, but it needs to be a pattern, not a marquee. Second, whether the ads business can outrun the take-rate decay in transaction revenue. If both lines hold, the multiple will recover. If either slips, this earnings reaction was the warm-up.
The framing CEO Rogers used on the call — that Instacart is "the leading grocery technology platform" rather than the largest grocery delivery marketplace — was deliberate, and revealing. It is the language of a company repositioning to compete on a different axis than the one it used to lead on.