As the cost of living crisis bites, a New Zealand company, Sumfood, has launched an app designed to help New Zealander’s save money at the supermarket. The free app lets consumers know which supermarket has the cheapest price, per person, for groceries.
Launched on 1 December, it is hoped that it will provide consumers with a little comfort at the checkout as the holiday season approaches.
Dr Helen Darling of Sumfood believes that the kiwi’s want to help kiwi’s find the best place to shop and, at the same time, drive supermarkets towards fairer and more transparent pricing. To do this, she said, will require innovative people to start using the app, as the amount of data builds, supermarkets will no longer be able to hide behind price differences.
“Anecdotally, we know that where you live has an impact on what you pay at the supermarket – it’s time for some transparency”. Price information is crowd-sourced from motivated consumers.
The app was designed in response to increasing concerns of food price inconsistencies reported through the company’s food reporting tool.
For the last two years the company has collected reports on food issues, with these ranging from concerns about food preparation or hygiene through to contaminants or foreign objects. The company provides a service to consumers that gives them advice on what to do and who to contact.
The new app, FoodSpies.com, uses crowd-sourced data to calculate the average price for a supermarket shop. Shoppers can log on and find the average price, per person, for supermarkets in their region. Data are sourced from shoppers who provide the cost of their shop and the pricing is continuously recalculated so that the most up-to-date information is available.
Darling said that it’s an exciting time to be launching another tool to help consumers, adding that the idea came from her young, motivated team who are committed to making food systems safer and fairer.
So, an average of shop totals across people with different preferences and household sizes and purchase frequencies.
Or you could just log into supermarkets websites and compare the prices of things you actually buy…
I tried the app out. It is basic and only tells you how much the total shop should cost at each individual supermarket for X number of people for X number of days. The price ranges significantly because it’s new so doesn’t have much user shopping data yet. One supermarket I frequent is missing from their list entirely. They make money by selling the raw data etc. At least they’re trying. Who knows, it might be useful to some but they’d need to get a lot of users contributing each shopping total for any meaningful data output. A downloadable app would be better as currently it’s an online sign in app.