You can use Instacart on ChatGPT to make a viral TikTok recipe, but I wouldn’t recommend it

Instacart just became the first company to offer an end-to-end integrated shopping experience with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It’s yet another signal that AI is about to upend the way we shop—and, maybe, the way we cook.

The new partnership was announced by Instacart and OpenAI on December 8. To use the interface, ChatGPT users need to make an Instacart account and then surface Instacart within their chat thread using a prompt like, “Instacart, help me shop for apple pie ingredients.” From there, they can discuss recipes, ingredient swaps, and their preferred store with ChatGPT, which will help them order all of the items they need from Instacart without ever changing tabs or leaving the chat.

This partnership is a significant milestone in the race among tech companies to make AI an integral part of the shopping experience. Amazon, for example, now offers a suite of AI tools to help shoppers make decisions and point them toward future purchases.

According to Adobe Digital Insights’ 2025 report on holiday season shopping, the company saw the first material surge in AI-directed traffic (users following links recommended by chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Gemini) to U.S. retail sites in 2024. This year, it expects AI traffic to rise by 520%. In all, Adobe found that over a third of shoppers in the U.S. have used AI to help with online shopping—and that number is bound to keep growing.

Clearly, many shoppers are already turning to ChatGPT for advice on the best products to buy and where to get them. For OpenAI, then, it makes sense to bring the shopping itself directly onto its own platform. In all likelihood, this partnership with Instacart is only a trial run ahead of plenty more integrations to come.

In a press release, Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, said that the new collaboration will allow users to “go from meal planning to checkout in a single, seamless conversation.” I decided to put Turley’s promise to the test by using the new interface the way I predict that its target audience might: recreating a TikTok-viral recipe (Ina Garten’s brownie pudding) from start to finish.

Testing out ChatGPT’s recipe-generating chops

Making a trendy recipe with the new Instacart integration starts with actually getting ChatGPT to accurately reproduce its ingredients and instructions—which, as it turns out, can be a challenge.

Based on my testing, ChatGPT is pretty good at regurgitating more general, nonspecific recipes from the open web. For example, a search for a “popular, gooey chocolate chip cookie” yields a standard recipe that ChatGPT describes as “similar to The New York Times or Nestlé Toll House”; while a search for “green goddess salad” yields a recipe that went viral in 2022 and has since resulted in dozens of publicly available articles, which ChatGPT is then able to pull from for its own summary.

Things get a bit trickier when you’re looking for one specific recipe, though—especially if it’s protected by a paywall or other blocker. When I asked ChatGPT to find the recipe and instructions for The New York Times’ Lemon-Tumeric Crinkle Cookies, it confidently provided a slightly inaccurate ingredient list and instructions, and attributed the recipe to the wrong author. I asked the question again, this time including the real author in the prompt, only to be met with the same response with the disclaimer, “I can’t reproduce the copyrighted article verbatim, but these ingredients + steps accurately reflect the recipe” (they didn’t). 

I moved on to attempting to recreate Ina Garten’s brownie pudding, starting by asking ChatGPT to “use popular TikTok videos” to find the recipe. The resulting recipe was almost correct, but not quite—it substituted Garten’s recommended framboise liquor for coffee. Next, I specifically requested that ChatGPT use the “most-viewed TikTok video” about the recipe in order to recreate it. The chatbot told me that it doesn’t have access “to TikTok’s live trending videos,” so it couldn’t pull exact instructions from the most-viewed clip, instead offering a “TikTok-style” version based on what it called “popular adaptations.” This version strayed even further from the original.

As a last-ditch effort, I asked ChatGPT to pull the brownie pudding recipe directly from Ina Garten’s official website. ChatGPT then assured me that it was providing “the exact recipe from her site (not an adaptation, not a TikTok version, but her real published recipe).” This was, once again, not the real recipe.

For OpenAI’s model, it seems, finding general recipes on the open web is simple, but accurately retrieving information from external apps, like TikTok, or paywalled websites, like The New York Times, is unpredictable at best.

Following this slightly maddening exchange, I decided to bake both Garten’s official recipe and ChatGPT’s bootleg “TikTok-style” version in order to decide which reigns supreme.

The battle of the brownie puddings

After my frustrating back-and-forth with ChatGPT, I was ready to throw in the towel and place my Instacart order as quickly as possible. But the process of actually using the integration proved to be a bit of a rollercoaster.

At first, everything was proceeding smoothly. I conducted several test runs using the activation word “Instacart,” and ChatGPT successfully added my requested ingredients to my cart directly through our chat. Mid-way through this experimentation, though, ChatGPT appeared to lose the plot, informing me, “I don’t have the ability to directly add items to Instacart or access your account.”

After several troubleshooting questions, during which ChatGPT informed me that the “Instacart connector” wasn’t active, I asked how to reactivate it. ChatGPT then said that I needed to be “in a ChatGPT Plus or Pro plan session with Plugins enabled.” In an email to Fast Company, though, an Instacart spokesperson clarified that the integration is available to all accounts, including free ones.

It’s unclear to me exactly what went wrong, but when I tried again several hours later in a new chat, the connection was up and working again. Ordering the ingredients for the “Tik-Tok style” recipe was quick and straightforward, and everything arrived from my local Target within two hours (except the unsalted butter, which was substituted for salted due to a store shortage). 

The recipes themselves were a similar concept with notably different executions. The “TikTok style” version, for example, called for vanilla extract instead of Garten’s seeds from one vanilla bean; likely a result of multiple TikTokers making the swap themselves at home and suggesting it to viewers (vanilla beans in this economy?). Garten’s original version also required cocoa powder alone for the chocolate component, whereas ChatGPT’s interpretation called for solid chocolate. And, in terms of the baking process, Garten’s pudding needed to be suspended in a water bath and baked for an hour, while ChatGPT omitted the water step entirely and suggested just 30 minutes in the oven.

Given its presumably crowd-sourced origins, the “TikTok-style” recipe was unsurprisingly cheaper, easier to make, and quicker. It had an extremely dark, almost bitter chocolate taste compared to the original recipe, which was mellower and sweeter. Both have their place, in my opinion—though Garten’s was ever so slightly tastier. 

Right now, the Instacart integration feels built for people who are already regular users of both ChatGPT and Instcart. For that niche, it might save time when brainstorming for meal prep and troubleshooting general recipes. But for everyone else, I’m not sold on the utility of this tool. If you have a specific recipe in mind, it’s probably easier (and less headache-inducing) to just make it the old-fashioned way.

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