Can Instacart reconfigure America’s grocery wars?

FIDJI SIMOHEC has a back story unusual even by the standards of Silicon Valley’s immigrant elite. Born in the port of Sète, in the Languedoc region of southern France, she was raised in a family of fishermen. With her father always at sea, she barely travelled. Yet she had style—her first name comes from a Guy Laroche perfume—and she had ambition. At a young age she vaulted from the Mediterranean, via the prestigious business school in Paris, to the coastline in northern California better known for the internet than fishing nets. There she made her name at Facebook’s social-media empire. As she puts it, “I jumped into the rocket ship.”On August 2nd, at 35 years old, she became chief executive of Instacart, an equally rocket-like online-grocery platform. The San Francisco-based firm has become a household name in America and Canada during the covid-19 pandemic for its app giving digital access to the shelves of 600 retailers, big and small, as well as its 500,000-strong army of gig-economy workers who pick and pack goods from supermarkets and deliver them to customers.