cost of groceries is a top financial concern<\/a> 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
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
![\"Hunger](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/supermarket-sushi-2EIQYZ52E5CDXAOQKZTXQV3JWY.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
Hunger and flavour imagery can lead to stronger food cravings. (Source: Getty)<\/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
“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 supermarkets’ 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% 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":567330,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[138,219,42,43,244,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-567329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-personal-finance","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567329"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567329\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Man](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/supermarket-generic-UJ33AQRPPNB23JBNBYR3SYFZSQ.jpg\")
<\/p>\n