FIJI SIMO has an unusual history, even by the standards of Silicon Valley’s immigrant elite. Born in the port of Sète, in the Languedoc region of southern France, she grew up in a family of fishermen. With her father still at sea, she barely traveled. Yet she had style – her first name comes from a perfume by Guy Laroche – and she had ambition. At a very young age, she jumped from the Mediterranean, through the prestigious HEC business school in Paris, to the northern California coastline better known for the Internet than for fishing nets. There, she made a name for herself in Facebook’s social media empire. As she says, « I jumped in the rocket. »

On August 2, at age 35, she became chief executive of Instacart, an equally rocket-packed online grocery platform. The San Francisco-based company has become a household name in America and Canada during the covid-19 pandemic for its app giving digital access to the shelves of 600 retailers large and small, as well as its army of 500,000 gig-economy . workers who pick and pack goods in supermarkets and deliver them to customers.

The work propels the Frenchwoman, like a modern-day Joan of Arc, into a pivotal position in the ongoing wagon wars. She has dark forces to contend with: Instacart, she claims, provides supermarkets with the technology to fight Amazon’s expanding electronic domain. She has revolutionary (some say heretical) ideas: she hopes to bring Facebook-like targeted advertising to the grocery shopping experience. And it has a mission: most of its senior managers, 70% of its contractors and four-fifths of its customers are women. The executive tilt is “absolutely strategic,” she says.

Yet it is also expected to soon lead Instacart to an initial public offering that will likely value it higher than most U.S. supermarkets. (The company declines to discuss an announcement.) To back up such an assessment, it needs to find ways to make it profitable, without alienating the supermarkets Instacart sees as its partners. The higher Instacart’s valuation, the more it suggests supermarkets will get the short end of the stick. As some of Instacart’s exclusive deals with them are reportedly starting to expire, major grocers may be taking notice.

Away from Facebook’s digital throne room, Ms. Simo has now thrust herself into one of the gnarliest corners of the real world, groceries, into one of the toughest businesses, delivery. If the economy of delivery platforms, from carpooling to meals, is difficult, those of transporting baskets of products are even more so. Supermarket margins, already thin, are falling, according to Bain, a consultancy, leaving little money for product drop-off fees on the doorstep. Buyers are increasingly price sensitive; hence the rise of discounters like Aldi and Lidl. At the height of the pandemic, stay-at-home orders gave people little choice but to pay extra for delivery. But as conditions return to normal, cost consciousness will also return. In the three months to June, according to Bloomberg Second Measure, a data company, grocery delivery sales fell year over year, after stratospheric increases in most of the previous 12 months.

Ms Simo acknowledges that after a breathless year, Instacart is at a « new resting heart rate ». As America’s online grocery share grows by a modest 8% of total sales, it predicts strong growth ahead. But the competition is intensifying. Walmart, America’s largest grocer, may have regained the upper hand in delivery. Amazon Fresh is a force to be reckoned with. Rival upstarts, such as DoorDash and Uber Eats, are moving from meals to everyday products (and, according to the News , a tech newsletter, rejected Instacart’s offers to merge or team up, respectively).

Meanwhile, as the IPO approaches, investors will want to gauge Instacart’s path to profitability. Its most recent valuation of $39 billion is already higher than that of Kroger, the second largest American supermarket chain, although Kroger’s revenue, at $132 billion last year, surpasses that of Instacart, at 1 .5 billion dollars. The implication is that investors think Instacart will either displace its supermarket partners in the coming years or become a high-margin digital advertising business. Ms. Simo insists it will be the latter.

She wastes no time. Already, she says, ad sales ($300 million last year, or a fifth of revenue) are growing at triple-digit rates. But that’s just to start. Days after taking over the company, she raided Facebook to find its chief marketing officer, Carolyn Everson, naming her president of Instacart. Ms. Simo sees enormous potential. Grocery, as she points out, is the largest segment of the retail industry. Until recently, the $1.5 billion consumer goods industry was unable to directly target shoppers when they put groceries in their carts. They can now buy online, and all the more effectively on the small screen of a mobile phone. Targeted ads give them even more bang for their buck.

Automation will be another support for growth. Instacart, Ms. Simo says, will continue to increase its number of packers and deliverers. But it recently signed a deal with Fabric, an Israeli company, to build small-scale robotic warehouses attached to its partners’ supermarkets, which will speed up picking and packing, allowing Instacart to cut delivery costs. The company will also step up its efforts to win the hearts and minds of customers and staff. One approach, clearly, is to pay more attention to the female perspective, not least because women do most of the grocery shopping. Another will be to make online shopping more entertaining.

Verification

It remains to be seen how many shoppers will greet a storm of advertisements as they browse the virtual aisles. For supermarkets, the big questions are how much they will sacrifice direct relationships with customers who access them via Instacart, and who will reap the most benefit from the advertising windfall. Ms. Simo insists that the benefits will be shared between Instacart and its partners. But, says Bain’s Steve Caine, many large US supermarkets are building their own online platforms to reduce their reliance on Instacart. The response has begun. It may not be a hundred years war. But it will be long. ■

This article appeared in the Business section of the paper edition under the title « Jeanne d’Instacart »