At the recent National Grocers Association (NGA) event, Instacart held its 2026 Independent Grocer Award Winners ceremony, where Associated Food Stores (AFS) received the Wholesaler Partnership Excellence Award. AFS was recognized for its deep collaboration with Instacart throughout the onboarding process, as well as the team’s hands-on approach to supporting the transition.
Typically, onboarding a retailer onto Instacart’s Storefront Pro or Storefront platforms can take up to a year per retailer. By taking a greater lead in the transition to these platforms, AFS was able to help accelerate the onboarding process.
“We realize there were some challenges with the transition,” said Glen Keysaw, AFS executive vice president of value chain. “However, now that we are past the initial onboarding, we are starting to see many wins that show we’re on a great path and have a modern commerce platform that our retailers can use to build solid ecommerce businesses off of.”
Since the holidays, AFS has seen an acceleration of development items deploying to all of our retailers:
- Digital coupons, with the ability to use coupons in our ecommerce stores
- Personalized and shoppable digital ad experience
- Digital ad scorecard, providing better insights into how shoppers are engaging with ads
- Store apps
- Fulfillment options (in supported areas)
- Push notifications
- B2B solution
- And much more
“I want to personally thank our retailers, Paul Pugh, Thomas Horne, Kellar Sirstins, and our partners at Instacart for helping to make this happen,” said Jason Sokol, vice president of marketing. “This project is a true reflection of what a 1AFS project can look like. It was a difficult lift for all of us, but we are on an incredibly exciting trajectory as we enter into 2026.”
To read more about the award and learn about others that were recognized, follow this link.