Instacart hired 300,000 new workers in one month, now it's bringing on 250,000 more as it grapples with a surge in demand

• Instacart is hiring 250,000 new workers as demand for online grocery delivery continues to surge.
• In the past month, it had already bought on 300,000 new workers.
• Describing demand in recent weeks, the company's president said: "This is well beyond Black Friday...Every day is a new Black Friday for us."
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Instacart is on a hiring spree.

The company announced Thursday that it would be hiring 250,000 new workers to help it meet the surge in demand for online delivery options during the coronavirus pandemic; it had already hired 300,000 new people in the past month.

Instacart is a delivery company that pairs customers with personal shoppers who deliver groceries to their homes. The shoppers work as independent contractors for the company and pick and deliver groceries at a wide range of chains across the US.

In recent weeks the company has been grappling with a surge in demand as shoppers opt for online ordering over in-store shopping.

In a recent interview with Credit Suisse food retail analyst Judah Frommer, Instacart president Nilam Ganenthiran described the past few weeks at the company:

"This is well beyond Black Friday," he said, comparing the surge in demand to one of the retail sector's busiest shopping days of the year. "Every day is a new Black Friday for us."

He said that over the past few weeks the company was seeing order volumes at levels that it had previously forecasted for the next two to four years.

"Customers are coming online in droves," he said.

The company has announced various measures to help protect its workers. It is offering 14 days of sick pay to any shopper that is diagnosed with coronavirus or placed in quarantine by a doctor. And on Thursday said that it is now offering personal protective kits to all its shoppers; these kits can be ordered on the shopper app dashboard, it said.