Tops Friendly Markets is pleased to now offer Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) eligible customers the ease of shopping online with Instacart.

SNAP shoppers can now pay for their same-day pickup or delivery orders with their EBT card while shopping online at Tops that partner with Instacart in New York State.

Tops offers Instacart services at 126 convenient New York locations.

“Tops Friendly Marketsis excited to pilot these services in our largest market of Instacart stores,” said Jill Sirica, manager, digital marketing for Tops.

“At the core of Tops mission is combating food insecurity and this will help bridge that gap of helping families gain accessibility to healthy and affordable food, something we have strived for since we began our partnership with Instacart. We are truly excited to see it come to fruition.” 

David Healy, who is in charge of retail partnerships at Instacart, said “Providing people access to the food they love is at the core of Instacart’s mission. We’re proud to partner with Tops Friendly Markets to provide more families with a convenient and accessible way to get their fresh food and pantry staples.

"Expanding EBT SNAP to reach same-day online grocery delivery and pickup is important to help people access the food they need, and we look forward to expanding this payment integration to even more retailers ...”

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is a federal program that provides assistance for low- and no-income U.S. residents to purchase food. SNAP benefits are processed through the Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) debit card system.

By associating your EBT card to your Instacart account (either website or mobile app), you confirm that your card information is current and valid. To successfully use your EBT card at a Tops location online, a credit or debit card must be linked to your Instacart account to cover non-food fees, such as bottle deposits in some states, taxes, delivery tips, and any other non-EBT SNAP-eligible items that you may want to purchaseper federal SNAP guidelines.

Customers can then enter their zip code to determine if they are near a participating Tops, and begin shopping and selecting items from Tops’ EBT-eligible products. Once items are added to their cart, customers will be able to select how much of their benefits they would like to allocate to the order. Orders for delivery and pickup can be placed by customers for receipt in as fast as an hour or scheduled several days in advance. 

To help subsidize costs for EBT SNAP participants, Instacart will waive delivery or pickup fees through Sept. 16 on up to the first three EBT SNAP orders for each customer with a valid EBT card associated with their Instacart account. For more information about EBT SNAP on Instacart, visit www.instacart.com/ebt-snap.

During these unprecedented times when the directive is to stay at home and to limit your interaction with others, the demand for both curbside pick up as well as home delivery has seen a sudden spike.

In fact, since the onset of COVID-19 impacted our nation, services like Instacart saw longer wait times than usual, noting order volumes increased by 300 percent last week alone compared to the same period the previous year.

Recognizing the impact to these services on its own customers, Tops began working closer with its partner Instacart to monitor the situation and increase the number of options to lighten the impact.

A number of measures were put into place early on to help alleviate the wait times including:

• Expanding the hours in which its Instacart employees (known as “shoppers”) can shop Tops stores, allowing them to more readily fulfill the orders being received;
• Continuously hiring and on-boarding thousands of new shoppers each week.

Additionally to help with the high demand for online orders, Tops own associates began picking online orders to assist Instacart shoppers in a pilot store yesterday, Thursday, April 16, with more stores immediately to follow.  

Vice President of Instacart Care, Mark Killick, said "Over the course of the last few weeks, the customer demand for our service, and the sheer number of shoppers on our platform has surged in the wake of COVID-19. In my 38 years in the customer support industry, I’ve never seen anything quite like this.

"From a Care operations perspective, most natural disasters and emergencies are high stakes, sudden but localized. In contrast, COVID-19 is affecting every one of us over a sustained period of time, and, as a result, we’ve had to reimagine and rescale our Care operations overnight to best serve customers and shoppers across North America."

Due to the pandemic, Instacart has become an essential service for millions of people in the United States and Canada who are depending on the platform to safely, reliably, and affordably get the groceries and household goods they need in a contactless manner.

Over the past few weeks, Instacart has launched new features to help minimize friction and increase safety and convenience for employees and customers including:

• An employee Safety Center to provide masks, hand sanitizer and thermometers at no cost;
• “Leave at My Door” default option for contact-less customer delivery;
• Fast and flexible option where customers receive an estimated delivery window and are notified when a shopper starts to work on their order ;
• Extended the ordering window from 7 days to 14 days;
• Evolving their Help Center and significantly increasing their number of agents.

"The last few weeks have been busier than we’ve ever imagined and our Tops team, along with Instacart, are working around the clock to serve all of our customers in this time of need,” said Ed Rick, director of digital and e-commerce for Tops.

“We will continue to be here for them and do everything we can to make their experience with us a positive one.”