Costco's custom sheet cakes, 10-inch round cakes, sandwich platters, shrimp trays, and fruit platters are now available for delivery nationwide — a first for the warehouse retailer — through Instacart and sameday.costco.com. The capability is powered by FoodStorm, Instacart's end-to-end order management system purpose-built for grocery perimeter departments including bakery and deli. For food and beverage operators watching how large-format retailers are closing the last gap in grocery e-commerce, this is a meaningful data point.
What FoodStorm Unlocks
The perimeter of the store — bakery, deli, prepared foods — has long been the stubborn holdout in grocery digitization. Unlike center-store SKUs, made-to-order items require custom specifications, lead time, and direct communication with production staff. FoodStorm bridges that workflow: online orders route directly to warehouse bakery and deli teams, eliminating the manual handoff that historically made custom item fulfillment impractical at scale. Customers can configure cakes online and schedule in advance, which also smooths demand forecasting for operators on the warehouse floor.
A Nine-Year Partnership Deepens
Costco and Instacart have been building this integration since their same-day delivery launch in 2017. The partnership now spans same-day e-commerce in the U.S., Canada, Spain, and France — powered by Instacart's Storefront Pro technology — along with EBT SNAP payment acceptance, alcohol delivery, and Executive Member monthly credits. Ryan Hamburger, Chief Commercial Officer at Instacart, framed the bakery expansion as a continuation of that trajectory: bringing Costco's made-to-order departments online extends the channel without requiring members to change their shopping behavior.
What This Signals for Operators
For foodservice and grocery operators evaluating their own perimeter digitization strategies, the Costco-Instacart model offers a replicable architecture. Third-party order management platforms that integrate directly with production workflows — rather than simply routing to a pickup counter — are becoming the standard ask in RFPs for catering, prepared foods, and custom bakery programs. Brands and hotel F&B teams running internal catering or event-day ordering should be pressure-testing whether their current tech stack can handle customized, advance-order volume the way FoodStorm does here. Suppliers and distributors pitching into the grocery perimeter category should likewise be tracking how retailers are using platform partnerships to justify SKU expansion in made-to-order segments.
Instacart's broader enterprise footprint — more than 2,200 retail banners representing nearly 100,000 stores — means FoodStorm learnings from the Costco deployment will inform how the platform sells into regional grocers and independent operators next. For brands competing on occasion-based purchasing (celebrations, corporate events, catering), delivery-enabled custom ordering from a warehouse club sets a new consumer expectation that independent operators and hotel banquet programs will need to address. The brand launch and retail readiness implications for CPG brands targeting club-channel occasion moments are worth watching alongside the operator intelligence on grocery perimeter tech trends accelerating in parallel.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
