Why this startup built a grocery store filled with fake lobsters and bananas in the middle of its office

On the 11th floor of a San Francisco skyscraper is "The Garden."The fake grocery store in the middle of Instacart's office is not just weird office decoralthough it wouldn't be out of place in some Silicon Valley offices.Instead, The Garden is an active testing ground for the grocery delivery startup, and one that it constructed in less than 48 hours.Now employees use the space to test everything from barcode-scanning algorithms in low light, to running Supermarket Sweep style speed contests.Instacart let Business Insider visit The Garden inside its San Francisco headquarters.Here's what it's like to have a fake grocery store in the middle of your office:SEE ALSO:The rise of Snapchat from a sexting app by Stanford frat bros to a $3 billion IPONot every startup has fake lobsters lying around its office, but Instacart isn't like any other company. Since its founding in 2012, it has been building a grocery delivery empire and has raised nearly $275 million to make the experience as easy and fast as possible 'for both the in-store shoppers and customers alike.Part of making it as fast for the customers as possible meant making it fast for Instacart's engineers, product managers, and designers to test things too. Its headquarters, however, is in the middle of downtown San Francisco, and not at all convenient for frequent runs to the grocery store to test new app updates. That's what inspired Max Mullen and Arnaud Ferreri to come up with the idea for "The Garden."The company was having a 48-hour hackathon, a Silicon Valley tradition where teams can brainstorm new ideas, when Mullen's team realized they wanted to build a physical grocery store. They turned one of the office's hangout and lounge spaces (like the one shown below on a different floor) into the mini testing ground.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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