Servant Leadership at Work with Fidji Simo, CEO and Chair, Instacart

Since her appointment as CEO and Chair of Instacart two years ago, Fidji Simo has been shaping a growing movement for affordable access to healthy and nutritious food, calling hunger not only a social threat, but a business imperative. She has shared this and other thoughts on the future of food and health as well as Instacart’s work to address the inequities in her Food for Thought newsletter on LinkedIn.

With inflation continuing to weigh heavily on Americans, food insecurity has become a greater threat to senior health and well-being, according to Alignment Health ’s 2023 Social Threats to Aging Well in America.

In 2024, Alignment and Instacart will offer a co-branded Medicare Advantage plan to bring healthy foods to the doorsteps of our chronically ill members, who because of their conditions will benefit from easier and more convenient access to nutrition.

In this Q&A, Fidji shares why Instacart is focused on food as medicine, her work at Metrodora Institute to treat neuroimmune axis disorders, and how servant leadership connects to her work, and even her role as a parent.

Clearly, your background and experience at Facebook / Meta made you an ideal candidate to take the helm of Instacart to chart its next chapter. As a new CEO, there are many directions you can take a company, so why was it important to address the intersection of food and public health?

I joined Instacart as CEO because I was inspired by the company’s mission to give people access to the food they love and more time to enjoy it together. We know that 85% of today’s health care costs come from treating diet-related conditions, so it was obvious to me that a company at the center of people’s relationship with food was already involved in health care. And I knew we had a responsibility to ensure that role was a positive one. That’s why we introduced Instacart Health and the strategy to use Instacart’s technology to scale food as medicine programs.

And the time is now. While preventative medicine has been top of mind for the health care community for forever, many diet-related conditions — like diabetes and high blood pressure — are still treated with medication before prescribing an effective diet. The tools haven’t existed to prescribe a diet, and insurance companies haven’t historically reimbursed the cost of nutritious foods. But both of those things are changing. Payers are beginning to understand the economic advantages of food as medicine and Instacart is building the tools to scale these programs.

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I understand that challenges in your personal health inspired you to co-found the Metrodora Institute, which treats neuroimmune axis disorders. How does this work connect to the health-related work at Instacart?

I founded Metrodora to create a new, collaborative model for health care: one that can turn scientific research into better patient outcomes. The gap between research and clinical practice is a problem across medicine. But it’s especially harmful to patients with neuroimmune axis disorders — complex conditions that affect multiple systems in the body. Metrodora is the first medical and research center intentionally designed to bring together world-class clinicians, scientists and technologists under one roof to create a collaborative approach to clinical medicine and scientific discovery.

Neuroimmune conditions are fundamentally very complex, but we do know that there’s a connection between the immune system and the gut. In fact, studies show that up to 70% of the immune system starts in the gut. Today, there’s more and more understanding of the gut-brain axis and how it impacts our overall health, and a lot of gut health starts with food. I believe food is going to play an essential role in curing and preventing neuroimmune axis disorders and so many others. That’s one of the reasons why the work we’re doing at Instacart Health to fund research is so important. These studies help us better understand how food can prevent and cure chronic conditions — and neuroimmune conditions are no exception.

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What does Servant Leadership mean to you, and how do you apply this principle to your work at Instacart and at Metrodora?

Organizations are always most successful when the people in them feel supported and confident enough to think bigger and build for the future.

For me, servant leadership is about looking for the magic in other people and shining a light on it.

As a leader, my job is to recognize the unique potential in everyone and set them up for success in roles that align with their greatest strengths — helping them navigate different challenges, trusting them to find the best solution and in the end, watching them rise to the occasion in a way they might not have thought was possible.

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How does Servant Leadership manifest itself in your life outside of work?

When I was first diagnosed with a neuroimmune condition, I knew I didn’t just want to find solutions for myself. I wanted to figure out what was broken for all the people suffering from these conditions and find a structural solution. Metrodora isn’t work for me, but it is a big part of how I put servant leadership to work outside of work. It’s taking my skill set and putting it in service of others — leading for an entire community.

Servant Leadership is also part of how I parent. I have an 8-year-old, and I think a lot about how I model servant leadership for her. When it comes to parenting, I think servant leadership is showing my daughter that the best kind of leadership is supporting others and finding the magic in them. I always try to look at her for who she is, shine a light on her magic, pour some fuel on it — and teach her to do the same with others.?

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Where do you see the Food as Medicine movement going, and how is Instacart shaping the movement?

The food as medicine movement is not new, but there are more meaningful conversations and action behind it than ever before. In the past, food as medicine programs have often been limited to the community level — maybe with a food pantry at your local hospital or a local produce delivery program. But now we have the technology to make these programs scalable and to reach the right patient populations with the best diet, backed by scientific data. We also have more data than ever before that proves that this work creates better economic outcomes for payers, providers and the entire health care ecosystem.

I’m optimistic that these programs will scale and have a massive impact on health care because we finally have the technologies to power this work and the data to prove that funding these programs can also drive positive business outcomes.

Instacart is the technology rails to scale these programs. If you’re a provider, you can offer patients with a specific diagnosis — like congestive heart failure — access to medically-tailored recipes and shopping lists with the click of a button. If you’re a payer, you can use Instacart Health Fresh Funds to pay for nutrition-specific member benefits. Or if you’re an employer, you can offer benefits to employees. We’ve made significant progress on this work over the last year — and there’s so much more to come!