He works at a dairy farm on the Taieri Plain near Dunedin.<\/p>\n
After returning from a decade working in Australia, he found grocery prices had become a pinch-point for most and tested his theory in a social media post that received more than 100,000 views.<\/p>\n
People agreed supermarket shopping had become a part-time job if they wanted to check for the best prices.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo me, that was pretty simple to go, right, this is a problem in New Zealand, and I think building this app is going to actually make a huge difference for New Zealanders to save money.\u201d<\/p>\n
Duff took his idea to a developer, and CheckMyTrolley launched a few months ago on Apple devices, with Android coming soon.<\/p>\n
It allows shoppers to create an online list and check which supermarket is the cheapest.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf I can help New Zealanders, I guess that\u2019s my drive; that\u2019s what I\u2019m hoping to get is to be like, look, someone\u2019s created this app that helps New Zealanders, saves money, well, hopefully saves a little bit of money for you.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I guess that\u2019s a success for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
He saved $148 using the app in one month.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s easier to compare over those prices and be like, right, I\u2019m definitely not shopping there because that\u2019s too expensive.<\/p>\n
\u201cI guess everyone feels it in New Zealand.\u201d<\/p>\n
CheckMyTrolley is the latest grocery comparison app to launch, joining Grocer and Grosave, each with different features.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s cheapest supermarket.<\/p>\n
Pak\u2019nSave came out top.<\/p>\n
Consumer\u2019s head of research and advocacy, Gemma Rasmussen, said people prefer to shop online to stick to their budgets.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBeing able to compare your whole shop online can lead to some pretty significant savings.\u201d<\/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
\u201cWe are seeing a massive swing towards buying the private label brands. With shoppers, they\u2019re just trying to make any way they can to purchase their food as cheaply as possible.\u201d<\/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
\u201cI started this as a side hockey project to collect the price data points from the supermarkets\u2019 website apps, and help myself do a bit of comparison.\u201d<\/p>\n
And so far the data has been interesting; some pricing patterns have emerged.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have this observation also backed by the data I\u2019ve collected so far: a lot of products\u2019 prices have a high-low pattern,\u201d he said, with one week being high and the next low.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is very common for processed goods like ice cream, chocolate, whereas the fresh produce is more bound to the season.\u201d<\/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 she had saved $100 over the past month.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m on the app just to save some money because I don\u2019t eat meat and plant-based foods can be expensive,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was interesting because I thought Pak\u2019nSave was the cheapest, but when I was looking, it was telling me Woolworths or New World.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bishell said a brand of tofu she buys is $3 cheaper at one supermarket.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt feels good because I try to be frugal and save. It makes me feel less stressed about money and supermarket shopping.\u201d<\/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
\u201cThere\u2019s this huge transparency issue for pricing; that\u2019s why we did this first, but as we expand this we want to make sure people have a healthy and affordable diet, that\u2019s our vision.\u201d<\/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\u2019s cart.<\/p>\n
As for scraping supermarkets\u2019 data, he said Foodstuffs and Woolworths are yet to get in contact.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t want to cause any trouble to their service.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe data is publicly available, so I think it\u2019s fine we haven\u2019t heard anything from the big players.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hong said their data shows people using Grosave save an average of 13% at each shop, which for a $250 weekly spend saves them just over $1000 a year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He works at a dairy farm on the Taieri Plain near Dunedin. After returning from a decade working…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567811,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2724,4057,138,279542,21656,7224,6788,12026,21436,700,111,139,69,3333,223,13971],"class_list":["post-567810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-app","tag-behind","tag-business","tag-checkmytrolley","tag-comparison","tag-dairy","tag-dunedin","tag-farmer","tag-grocery","tag-latest","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-price","tag-the","tag-williams"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567810","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=567810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567810\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}