Wild Planet: Leveraging Instacart To Reel In New Customers
The Challenge
As the first large-scale sustainability-focused seafood company, Wild Planet is no stranger to swimming upstream. The canned seafood brand has steadily captured market share in a category dominated by legacy value competitors, and Instacart has played a key role in this growth.
With tools like conversion-driving ads and bid optimizations, Instacart’s grocery tech leadership provides powerful ways to expand reach and engage new audiences – a rarity in traditional grocery channels. Its convenience and ubiquity allow Wild Planet to connect with potential consumers at the start of their shopping journey.
Recognizing this massive opportunity, Wild Planet set out to increase awareness and sales among new customers. To help reel in new-to-brand shoppers, it partnered with Tinuiti—its full-funnel performance agency and retail media experts.
Results
+54%
increase in new-to-brand sales
2-point
gain in category market share
5x
increase in ROAS
How We Did It
Positioning Wild Planet around its quality, taste, and uniquely sustainable practices, Tinuiti crafted a strategy to attract high-intent shoppers ready to try something new.
Focusing on frequent canned-seafood buyers who hadn’t yet purchased Wild Planet, Tinuiti implemented brand, category, and competitor keyword targeting, ensuring the campaign connected with the audience at the right moment.
For even more precise targeting, Tinuiti segmented Wild Planet’s products into three categories – Tuna, Sardines, and Ready-to-Eat. This allowed Tinuiti to tailor ads based on shoppers’ past purchase behaviors.
To rapidly build awareness and consideration, Tinuiti launched high-impact Shoppable Display ads on Instacart – blending personalized messaging, compelling imagery, and convenient “add-to-cart” functionality. Most importantly, customers saw these ads while they were actively shopping, ensuring Wild Planet was top of mind when considering traditional proteins.
The campaign made a huge splash, driving a 54% surge in new-to-brand purchases and increasing YoY market share by 2 points, reaching nearly 14%. Promotions for albacore tuna saw a 4.5x ROAS, proving this data-driven strategy didn’t just attract new customers—it kept them hooked.
Winning market share as a sustainably-sourced challenger brand, going up against the big legacy players isn’t easy. But with Tinuiti’s collaboration and strategic expertise in working with Instacart, we unlocked a whole new audience, enabling us to have a market share six times higher than we have our in-store grocery average.
Max Rudy
Director of E-commerce, Wild Planet Foods
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