Both have roughly 70,000 users.<\/p>\n
Consumer NZ researchers recently analysed the online prices of a basket of 16 everyday grocery items, across eight weeks and four cities, to find New Zealand’s cheapest supermarket. Pak n Save came out top.<\/p>\n
Consumer’s head of research and advocacy Gemma Rasmussen said people prefer to shop online to stick to their budgets.<\/p>\n
“It means that they can really stick to a list and purchase just that, whereas sometimes when you go into the store you might deviate a little bit,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Being able to compare your whole shop online can lead to some pretty significant savings.”<\/p>\n
A recent Consumer NZ survey shows the cost of groceries is a top financial concern for households, a change from five years ago when it ranked below rent and power.<\/p>\n
“We are seeing a massive swing towards buying the private label brands with shoppers they’re just trying to make any way they can to purchase their food as cheaply as possible.”<\/p>\n
Grocer is still a hobby project, according to its developer Roc Wong, a software engineer.<\/p>\n
![\"Grocer](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/4JJZUNP_Roc_Wong_set_up_the_Grocer_app_jfif.jpeg\")
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Grocer developer Roc Wong<\/p>\n
SUPPLIED<\/p>\n
He started the price comparison app five years ago.<\/p>\n
“I started this as a side hockey project to collect the price data points from the supermarkets, website apps, and help myself do a bit of comparison.”<\/p>\n
And so far the data has been interesting, some pricing patterns have emerged.<\/p>\n
“I have this observation also backed by the data I’ve collected so far, a lot of products’ prices have a high-low pattern,” he said with one week being high and the next low.<\/p>\n
“This is very common for processed goods like ice cream, chocolate, whereas the fresh produce is more bound to the season.”<\/p>\n
Wong said the supermarkets have not expressed any concern about the app or data scraped for it.<\/p>\n
Dunedin student Lara Bishell uses the CheckMyTrolley app to compare prices and said over the last month she has saved $100.<\/p>\n
“I’m on the app just to save some money because I don’t eat meat and plant based foods can be expensive,” she said.<\/p>\n
“It was interesting because I thought Pak’nSave was the cheapest but when I was looking it was telling me Woolworths or New World.”<\/p>\n
Bishell said a brand of tofu she buys is $3 cheaper at one supermarket.<\/p>\n
“It feels good because I try to be frugal and save. It makes me feel less stressed about money and supermarket shopping.”<\/p>\n
Christchurch based software developer Tim Hong co-founded the grocery price-comparison app Grosave in April last year, with Murray Wong and Jayon Thomas.<\/p>\n
![\"Christchurch](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/4JJZUNP_Tim_Hong_1_jfif.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Christchurch based software developer Tim Hong co-founded Grosave in April last year.<\/p>\n
SUPPLIED<\/p>\n
“There’s this huge transparency issue for pricing that’s why we did this first but as we expand this we want to make sure people have a healthy and affordable diet, that’s our vision.”<\/p>\n
Hong said they plan to soon add a function to enable users to buy online, from the app, clicking through to the supermarket’s cart.<\/p>\n
As for scraping supermarket’s data, he said Foodstuffs and Woolworths are yet to get in contact.<\/p>\n
“We don’t want to cause any trouble to their service. The data is publicly available so I think it’s fine we haven’t heard anything from the big players.”<\/p>\n
Hong said their data shows people using Grosave save an average 13 percent each shop, which for a $250 weekly spend saves them just over $1000 a year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A dairy farmer has launched a free app that lets shoppers check their online grocery list to see…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":591230,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[61,60,202,80],"class_list":["post-591229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mobile","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mobile","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=591229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/591229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/591230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=591229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=591229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=591229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}