Instamart baskets carried 4.15 items on average in Q2 2026, up from 3.93 a year earlier. That half-item difference explains most of what looks like broad category growth in this quarter's data: when orders touch more categories, almost every category's presence rate rises together.
What is genuinely new is which categories gained the most inside that larger basket. Staples went from being present in 41.45% of orders to 44.66%, up 3.21 percentage points, the single largest move of any category. Snacks, already in nearly half of all orders, gained a further 1.73 points to 48.92%. Masalas and dry fruits rose 1.89 points to 24.61%.
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These are not the categories you would expect to benefit from a bigger basket by default. A larger basket could just as easily mean more discretionary add-ons. Instead the biggest gainers are the routine, planned-purchase categories, the ones a shopper adds because the trip already justified it, not because a promotion caught their eye.
AOV moved on its own separate track. It rose from INR 432 in April 2025 to INR 537 in April 2026, a jump that had already happened by the start of Q2 and was not a within-quarter development. Through the rest of Q2 2026, AOV actually eased slightly, INR 522 in May and INR 501 in June, before climbing back to INR 520 in July. Order frequency moved the opposite way to its own pattern from Q1: after dipping to 2.38 orders per user in April, it climbed to 2.53 in May, 2.52 in June and 2.64 in July, the highest reading in either year.
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Put together, the quarter shows a basket that grew in composition before it grew in price, and a frequency recovery that arrived a month behind the basket. Health supplement continued its run from earlier this year, up 1.55 points to 5.34%, while beverages added 2.79, consistent with the coffee and cold drinks patterns already documented on the platform this year.
For an FMCG brand in staples or packaged snacks, the practical read is that Instamart's core grocery categories are not losing ground to newer, higher-margin additions. They are gaining share inside a basket that is both bigger and, by July, being filled more often.
Tags: Quick commerce · Instamart · Category mix · Basket size · Q2 2026 · Consumer panel data · FMCG
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