For the whole of 2025, tea sat comfortably ahead of coffee on Instamart. Tea held between 1.98% and 2.19% of orders every month. Coffee never crossed 1.78%.
In March 2026 coffee went past it and has not been behind since.
Coffee reached 2.26% of Instamart orders in March against tea's 1.87%. By May it hit 3.38%, nearly double tea's 1.82%. Even after the summer peak passed, July had coffee at 2.81% and tea at 2.03%. Across Q2 as a whole, coffee moved from 1.68% of orders to 2.95% year on year. Tea slipped from 2.12% to 1.78%.
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One brand did most of it. Nescafe held 29.5% of Instamart coffee orders in Q2 2025. In Q2 2026 it held 50.7%. Sleepy Owl went from 8.1% to 12.8%. The brands that lost ground were the traditional filter and instant names: Tata fell from 11.1% to 4.0%, Continental from 7.0% to 4.6%, Bru from 11.2% to 9.6%. Two brands now account for 63.5% of the category on the platform.
The wider seasonal picture is what you would expect, and it is worth having the actual shape. Cold drinks and juices climbed from 18.42% of orders in January to a 23.55% peak in May, then eased to 20.79% by July. Soft drinks drove the bulk of it at 12.46% of Q2 orders. The broader beverages group, which covers coffee, tea, health drink mixes and squashes, gained 2.76 percentage points year on year in Q2, more than four times the 0.69-point gain in cold drinks. The summer story on Instamart is not really about fizzy drinks. It is about what people are mixing at home.
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Two other movers are worth flagging. Team sports went from 0.27% of orders in January to 1.26% in May and has held above 1.2% since, which lines up with the cricket season and has not decayed the way a one-off spike would. Health drink mixes rose from 2.47% to 3.53% year on year in Q2.
For a coffee brand, the read is that Instamart has become a genuine channel rather than a top-up one, and that the category has consolidated hard around a single leader in twelve months. For a tea brand, the same twelve months went the other way, in a category that was comfortably ahead as recently as February.
Tags: Quick commerce · Instamart · Coffee · Tea · Beverages · Q2 2026 · Consumer panel data · FMCG
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