Instacart-Funded Studies Claim No Conflicts of Interest. But What's In It for Instacart?

Most of you know that my first academic love is thinking about food systems. Working to make sense of how our world produces and consumes food led me to commercial determinants. I keep a close eye on how big business enables or constrains who gets to eat what, or at all.

You can imagine how excited I was to learn about and research Instacart’s policy agenda to “Expand Access to Nutritious Food for All.” The online grocery delivery and pick-up company is designing the shopping site to accept Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) payments and offer delivery on SNAP-purchased foods. It’s also advocating to digitize Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) benefits so people can use them to buy stuff online. That’s a mission I can get behind.

To advance the policy goal, the Instacart Health Initiative was launched in 2022. It provides researchers access to Instacart’s platform and data to run their (usually publicly funded) studies on healthy food access. It also funds research directly, including work that is building the evidence for food as medicine programs. We do need more research on how people can access more nutritious foods in general and to address diet-related health conditions, I thought, so no qualms there.

But I started to feel skeptical when I noticed that Instacart presents its policy and research goals of expanding SNAP and nutrition access as only altruistic and mission driven. If I’ve learned anything from my journey with Commercially Determined, it’s that when big corporations are involved in research or policy it’s almost never purely out of the goodness of their hearts. I kept wondering: "What's in it for them?"

So, I delved into published academic papers (like this and this), non-profit research briefs (like this), and company research blogs (like this) that detail the findings from these research partnerships, looking for some mention of possible conflicts of interest. I noticed a couple of problems with how some of the pieces I looked at discuss their Instacart partnerships. The non-profit and corporate pieces say nothing about conflicts at all. This includes reporting favorable findings claiming that people in the study bought more fruits and vegetables when using the platform without their groceries costing more. Meanwhile, two academic papers list Instacart as a funder but go on to state that there are no conflicts of interest in the work, with one of them saying:

“The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest."

How can these works not mention the commercial conflict of interest with being funded or otherwise supported by Instacart? It doesn't take much to imagine how Instacart might benefit from favorable findings from the studies it supports. They will, in one way or another, get more people to shop on its platform. The reasons this does not get explicitly mentioned are complex. I share the rest with you not to call out any individuals involved, but to point to a larger structural problem with how scientific findings are presented to different audiences.

We live in a world where some journals still allow, and sometimes implicitly encourage through narrow definitions, academic papers that acknowledge corporate funding to simultaneously claim no commercial conflicts of interest with their research. Many publishing systems separate institutional research ‘funding’ from authors’ personal ‘competing interests,’ yielding a misleading impression that the former does not introduce bias into the research decisions of the latter. This outdated understanding of how commercial research conflicts work is a problem that is still baked into publishing policies.

We also live in a world where non-profits and corporations who perform research and communicate findings do not (and are not required to) hold themselves to the same disclosure and accountability scientific standards as would be expected from academic peers. This speaks to a larger problem of a lack of research integrity policy in science-adjacent spaces.

As a result, we live in a world where research deployed for profit, including in support of a corporate policy agenda, can appear as neutral, disinterested fact, undermining publicly funded science itself.

To go deeper into why the silence about conflicts and claims of no conflicts are an issue in the case of Instacart, let’s consider why researchers make conflict of interest statements in the first place and why we should care. 

Having a conflict is not illegal or unethical per se. It matters to science, however, when a conflict introduces bias into a study, consciously or subconsciously, intentionally or not. Systematic reviews of food science, nutrition, cholesterol, chemotherapy, and clinical drug and device research show industry-backed studies are more likely to report industry-favorable results or conclusions versus independent research. Corporate involvement in research also influences the broader research agenda, focusing scientists’ work narrowly on products and processes that can be monetized, effectively limiting the questions that can be asked in the first place.

Declaring conflicts of interest is one way scientists aim to be transparent to build trust in their work. When undeclared conflicts of interest are discovered, people’s trust in science may reduce. Clarifying competing interests helps readers contextualize the findings. Without transparency, the results can’t be properly understood and lack of understanding can breed mistrust.

Biased industry-friendly findings, like those the systematic reviews found, can also introduce doubt about the state of evidence on harmful commercial determinants. This scientific-looking disinformation is often exactly the point in corporate-backed contrarian research designed to delay industry regulation.