Instacart Introduces Alcohol-Focused Fizz App to Tap Gen Z Market

Instacart is reportedly rolling out an app targeting Generation Z consumers, centered around group orders of drinks and party snacks.

This app, Fizz, lets multiple users contribute to a single order, pay for their own purchases and have them delivered together for a flat fee of $5, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (May 6), citing comments from Daniel Danker, Instacart’s chief product officer.

He said that Fizz will be complementary to Instacart, with younger users employing the app and then turning to Instacart as their “lives evolve.” The push follows Instacart’s recent move to reduce the minimum spend to $10 from $35 for paid subscribers to receive free delivery, a decision that increased engagement.

Instacart began work on the app at the beginning of the year, Danker said. Merchants offering the drinks and snacks on Fizz are grocery and liquor stores with existing relationships with Instacart. Danker said Fizz will bring more retailers to Instacart.

The report noted that rival companies have recently been pushing into alcohol-related offerings. DoorDash has reported a 96% increase in orders of ready-to-drink cocktails, while Uber added alcohol delivery to Uber Eats after acquiring beverage delivery app Drizly. Uber terminated that service in January 2024.

PYMNTS examined Gen Z’s preferences for alcohol purchases earlier this year in an interview with Akshet Tewari, the chief executive at the consumer robotics and cocktail subscription company Barsys.

He predicted that younger consumers will increasingly purchase their alcoholic beverages via subscription service.

“I think this subscription is going to be the way forward, because for people — the millennials and Gen Z coming into picture — there’s a massive rise in experimentational drinking,” Tewari explained. “… Subscriptions are … going to be a big part of the spirits industry, especially when it comes to in-home bar consumption. They will provide consumers with access to cocktails that they would have not been able to make before.”

Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has found that younger consumers tend to do more of their shopping via subscription, according to the report “The Replenish Economy: A Household Supply Deep Dive.”

That study found that 39% of millennial consumers said they had used scheduled and auto-fill product subscriptions for most of or all their regularly used products in the prior six months. This share is substantially larger than the overall 31% of consumers who said the same. The report also logged a similar trend among Gen Z consumers, although to a lesser degree.