There’s an old saw in the drinks industry that holds that you build a brand in the on-premise and a business in the off-premise. On a volume basis, people buy a lot less beverage alcohol at a bar or restaurant than they do at a store. It makes sense, right? Buying a case of pinot noir at the supermarket to stock up for a party is pretty normal. But do likewise at the Olive Garden across the strip-mall parking lot, and you’d be in for a lot of attention—and on the hook for a massive markup.

For this reason among others, consolidation in food retail is a critical factor in the evolution of the American booze business. And while the convenience-store channel is structurally unfavorable to sweeping national roll-ups, the grocery channel is structurally primed for it. This has taken two shapes: outside interlopers buying their way into the sector, as Amazon famously did in 2017 with its purchase of Whole Foods, or brick-and-mortar incumbents trying to buy each other, as Kroger most recently attempted with its pitch to acquire Albertsons, which fell apart in 2024. But since the pandemic, the war for grocery share has been increasingly waged online, and the future of a key piece of beverage alcohol’s retail tier hangs in the balance. Which is why when DoorDash proposed in late October to purchase Instacart for $17 billion, uniting the country’s largest restaurant-delivery platform and largest grocery-delivery platform under the former’s big red banner, I immediately wanted a closer look.

Joining The Fingers Podcast today is Kristen Hawley, the veteran journalist who publishes Expedite, an independent newsletter about the future of restaurants. From her vantage point in San Francisco, she’s been covering Silicon Valley’s lucrative, contentious invasion of the hospitality industry for years, making her the perfect person to put this seismic deal in proper context. Kristen and I discussed why DoorDash wants Instacart, why this deal is happening now, and what it would do to the hyper-competitive grocery landscape if it goes through. Tune in.

I’m working on getting the The Fingers Podcast archive back online, too. There were some real bangers in there! More to come soon.

The transcript excerpts below have been edited for length and clarity. This interview was recorded on November 2nd, 2026.

Infante: This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard about this acquisition, right?that we've heard about this, right? There was some serious tire-kicking going on earlier this decade.

Hawley: Yeah. In 2020, when these platforms were scrambling to get as big as they possibly could under the best possible conditions while we were all stuck at home, not able to go out anywhere because of the pandemic, Instacart was at the height of its valuation. It was worth between $40 and $50 billion on the private market. DoorDash wanted an acquisition then, and explored one. The reporting at the time was that they disagreed over price, and they were concerned about regulation under the Biden administration and Lina Khan at the head of the Federal Trade Commission, the most ardent antitrust warrior of the last three decades. So that didn't happen then, and I guess perhaps to DoorDash's financial benefit because 17 is much less than 50.

Infante: You mentioned DoorDash’s longstanding ambition for grocery as a channel. Could you sketch out a little bit more the way the company thinks about itself and its future?

Hawley: DoorDash wants to completely reinvent and own local delivery and local business. They started with restaurants. Remember Amazon 20 years ago? “We started with books, now we do everything.” That’s DoorDash now, but for local commerce. So restaurants went first, and arguably hot prepared restaurant food is a much harder problem to solve than grocery, which can happen at many different times of the day, can be scheduled differently. The next step in their local delivery dominance is to get really big in grocery, and that means that they can have more people doing deliveries. They can reach a larger customer base. They can sell more subscriptions to their monthly subscription service, which is really driving all of this.

They have something called DashPass, and it has unlimited delivery and some discounts and all kinds of small print. But the people that sign up for DashPass in restaurants, if they're if they're restaurant power users, tend to convert to grocery pretty fast. I think something like three-quarters of DoorDash's grocery business pre-Instacart came from its subscription pass holders.

Infante: Let’s say this deal goes through. Where does DoorDash then rate among the incumbents that it’s trying to go up against?

Hawley: There is hella AI happening inside grocery stores. DoorDash and Instacart are both using shoppers to take photos and deal with inventory management, and they're building all kinds of predictive models about like what's going off the shelves, what's not, what's staying, when replacements happen… I think Instacart wanted to digitize stores so that managers can know in real time more about their inventory. There's a ton of backend tech that's happening from both companies that they can sell into stores that the consumer never sees.

So DoorDash and Instacart are able to work with a Kroger, Albertsons, Safeway, whatever. They don’t have the same market share, nor the same technology, as an Amazon or Walmart. So DoorDash is able to provide that layer, and I suspect in the same aggressive way that they went after independent restaurants to be their infrastructure, they're doing that with grocery.

Since starting The Fingers Podcast back up, I’ve spoken with: