The Scenario
You're on the growth team at a grocery delivery startup evaluating which US markets to enter next. Your analyst built an Excel workbook with 80 target ZIP codes — each one a potential expansion market. Before the quarterly planning meeting on Friday, you need to know which Instacart retail partners are available in each area so you can assess competitive overlap.
You found the Instacart Developer Platform docs. The retailer availability endpoint is documented. You have no idea how to write the API call, and the meeting is in three days.
The bad version:
- Open the Instacart Developer Platform, find the retailer availability endpoint, figure out authentication.
- Make the first request for ZIP code 10001. Get back a JSON array of retailer objects. Figure out which fields to extract.
- Manually copy the retailer names into the adjacent column. Move to ZIP code 10002.
- Eighty rows, each requiring a separate API call and manual transcription of the response.
Your job is market strategy, not API integration. The 80-row manual approach isn't a plan — it's a detour from the actual work.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Excel workbook. It reads the ZIP code list, calls the Instacart retailer availability endpoint for each one, and writes the results back to the workbook — all from one prompt.
Check which Instacart retailers are available in each postal code in my Excel 'Market Research' sheet and add a 'Retailers' column with the results and a 'Count' column with how many are available.
What You Get
- A Retailers column populated with a comma-separated list of Instacart retail partners available in each ZIP code.
- A Count column with the number of retailers per ZIP code — ready to sort or filter for the Friday presentation.
- ZIP codes that return zero retailers get "No retailers found." Invalid ZIP codes get a note in an adjacent column.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The ZIP code list has duplicates and invalid entries mixed in
Some ZIP codes appear twice. A few entries are five-digit strings that aren't valid US postal codes.
In the Market Research sheet, clean column A by removing duplicate ZIP codes and flagging entries that are not valid 5-digit US postal codes. Then look up available Instacart retailers for each valid, unique ZIP code and write results into the Retailers and Count columns.
You want to filter to only ZIP codes where a specific retailer is present
You're specifically evaluating overlap with one major chain. You only care about markets where that chain is available on Instacart.
For each ZIP code in the Market Research sheet, look up available Instacart retailers. Write the full retailer list into the Retailers column and the count into the Count column. Add a "Kroger Present" column with "yes" if Kroger appears in the retailer list and "no" if it does not. Sort the sheet so "yes" rows appear at the top.
You want to enrich the results with population data from another worksheet
The workbook has a second worksheet with ZIP code population data. You want to join it with the retailer coverage data.
Look up available Instacart retailers for each ZIP code in the Market Research sheet and write results into the Retailers and Count columns. Then join with the Population worksheet on the ZIP code column and add a Population column to Market Research so you can score markets by retailer count per capita.
Clean the ZIP list, check availability, and produce a market-ready summary in one pass
The Friday presentation needs a separate worksheet with just the high-coverage markets.
Deduplicate and validate the ZIP codes in the Market Research sheet. For each valid ZIP code, look up available Instacart retailers and write the count into the Count column and names into the Retailers column. Then create a new worksheet called "High Coverage" containing only rows where Count is 5 or greater, sorted descending by Count.
All of that — deduplication, API calls, filtering, and the summary worksheet — in one prompt.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your market research workbook with ZIP codes, then ask it to look up Instacart retailer availability for each one. Also see: Generate Retailer-Specific Instacart Recipe Links and the Instacart integration overview.