Celebrating our Progressive Grocer Top Women in Grocery Winners

Today, we’re proud to celebrate four women at Instacart who have been selected for Progressive Grocer’s 2022 Top Women in Grocery list.

Progressive Grocer’s annual Top Women in Grocery award recognizes the integral role women play across all segments of the North American grocery industry and celebrates continued achievements and accomplishments of women in the industry.

Our Instacart winners — Asha Sharma, Alice Luong, Latrice Coleman and Michelle McRae — have all played key roles in our company’s success over the past year, helping to transform and grow our Operations, Retail, Fulfillment and Access to Food & Nutrition teams through their excellent leadership. We’re grateful to have these incredible women as part of our teams and celebrate their achievements as leaders in the North American grocery industry.

Meet Asha Sharma
Progressive Grocer Top Women in Grocery Winner – Senior-Level Executive Category

As Chief Operating Officer of Instacart, Asha oversees the core business company’s growth and core experience across logistics, product, research, partnerships, marketing, corporate development, and strategy. Asha joined Instacart from Facebook in May 2021, where she was Vice President of Product for many of the company’s private communications products across Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. During her time at Facebook, Asha also previously served as VP of Product for Messenger, and before that, as Head of Product for Social Impact. Before Facebook, Asha was the COO of Porch.com, where she spent years building the business from the ground up and was responsible for helping scale the company’s operations, product, marketing, and growth. Prior to joining Porch, she worked in marketing and operations at Microsoft.

Asha is passionate about serving as a mentor, coach, and role model for women in product and across the company. She is actively involved in Women@Instacart, the company’s largest employee resource group that aims to connect, empower, and provide opportunities for anyone who identifies as a woman and women allies. 

What’s always in Asha’s cart? Petite Greenies for her dog (aussie!) Raspberry Pi

Meet Alice Luong
Progressive Grocer Top Women in Grocery Winner – Rising Star Category

Alice Luong is a Director of Market Strategy and Planning (MS&P) at Instacart. As Instacart’s first MS&P employee, Alice was tapped to build out the program and hire a team focused on combining Instacart’s differentiation, market insights, and retailer needs and translating these inputs into Instacart’s enterprise offerings – all to drive digital transformation for retailers’ white-label ecommerce properties. Fostered by her current and previous experience in sales planning, product, and account management, Alice has become a resilient, adaptable, and hyper-collaborative leader who consistently achieves success and drives valuable outcomes for her partners. 

Alice also helped to establish and co-lead Business Development’s Diversity, Equity, and Belonging group at Instacart. They work to prioritize a race, ethnicity, and gender equity-focused approach to achieve parity across all of Instacart’s systems and processes. 

What’s always in Alice’s cart? Frozen blueberries for morning smoothies!

Meet Latrice Coleman
Progressive Grocer Top Women in Grocery Winner – Rising Star Category

Latrice Coleman is a Director of Partner Ops at Instacart. In her role, Latrice leads one of Instacart’s larger operations teams responsible for operational excellence of partner-picked and curbside-run programs.

Latrice and her team are responsible for helping partners quickly deploy Instacart fulfillment technology and scale in-store picking operations. Through her work, she unlocks new value for retailers, building and expanding e-commerce with pickup and allowing grocers to serve customers in a new way. Latrice has enabled more than 90% of Instacart Pickup partners to adopt Instacart fulfillment technologies that empower in-store retail teams to pick and pack orders, manage curbside pickup and enhance operational efficiency.

Outside of her role at Instacart, Latrice serves as the social chair for Management Leadership for Tomorrow’s (MLT) alumni board in Washington, D.C, a nonprofit professional organization focused on ensuring talented underrepresented minorities have the opportunity to get on and stay on the path to senior leadership. As part of her role, she helps with local programming and ongoing alumni engagement efforts in D.C. and across the broader organization.

What’s always in Latrice’s cart? Jalapeños

Meet Michelle McRae
Progressive Grocer Top Women in Grocery Winner – Rising Star Category

Michelle is Director of Access to Food & Nutrition at Instacart. In this role, Michelle serves as a cross-functional leader responsible for strategizing about how Instacart can address and serve as a long-term solution for food-insecure populations and people with diet-related diseases as part of a sustainable business. Currently, one of the Access to Food & Nutrition drivers is Instacart’s EBT SNAP payments offering, where Michelle works with a cross-functional team to ensure its success and utilization. She also determines how Instacart can focus on alternative private and public funds to create additional opportunities for vulnerable populations to access food more easily.

Michelle’s role involves working cross-functionally to connect dots between teams and make sure each team has what they need in order to execute against the business’ food access and nutrition strategy. Since joining the Access the Food & Nutrition team, Michelle is driving efforts to work with external partners to help increase dignity for food insecure populations and develop new partnerships in the food as medicine space.

Michelle also started Instacart’s Women@ Employee Resource Group. She is actively involved in helping to further the ERG’s mission and onboarding a cohort of Women@ leads to help execute programming and grow the ERG’s membership.

What’s always in Michelle’s cart? Frank’s Hot Sauce & Blueberries

Congratulations Asha, Alice, Latrice, and Michelle!

Instacart

Instacart is the leading grocery technology company in North America, partnering with more than 1,400 national, regional, and local retail banners to deliver from more than 80,000 stores across more than 14,000 cities in North America. To read more Instacart posts, you can browse the company blog or search by keyword using the search bar at the top of the page.