Grocery Price Tracking
What is price tracking?
The Saucery can connect to your local supermarket and show you current prices, specials, and price history for the products you buy. This is a Saucery Pass feature.
Choosing your supermarket
Whoever creates the family is offered this as the last step of setting it up. If they skipped it, or you want to change it later:
- Go to Settings > Price Lookup. Settings is the gear icon.
- Choose the store you actually shop at. The Saucery covers Woolworths, Pak'nSave and New World in New Zealand.
Only a family admin can choose the store. Everyone else in the family sees its prices, including someone whose phone is set to another country: once the family has a store, your region doesn't change which stores you're offered.
Pick the store, not just the chain. Pak'nSave and New World set their prices store by store, so a New World in one suburb can be dearer than the one two suburbs over. Choosing your own store is what makes the prices on your shopping list the prices you will actually pay. Woolworths prices the same across the country, so there is only one to choose.
One store at a time, for the whole family. Change it whenever you like; the prices follow within a few minutes.
What you get
Prices on your shopping list
Each line on your shopping list shows a price from your store. You don't have to set anything up for this: The Saucery finds the products at your store that are plainly the thing on the list (milk, not milk chocolate) and shows the one that covers the amount on the line for the least money, such as from $2.89 for a litre of milk when the recipe needs 350 ml. It goes by the price per kilo or litre, not the shelf price, so a 500g block of butter beats a 200g one, and 1.5 kg of mince is priced by the kilo rather than as five small packs. Parmesan is priced from parmesan cheese, not parmesan bagels, and milk from fresh milk unless the line asks for UHT. When a recipe asks for a whole chicken, the line is priced from a whole bird. A line nothing at the store matches has no price, rather than a wrong one.
At the top of the list is an estimate of the shop, such as About $143.20 for 41 of 54 items. Meat and vegetables sold by weight are costed by the amount on the line, and packs by how many you need, so it is a guide rather than a till receipt. Lines without a price aren't in it.
Choosing the exact product
Tap a line's price to see what your store has, best match first, and pick the one you buy. The line then shows that product's price, without "from", and every list after it uses the same product, as do your recipes with that ingredient. To go back to the store's best match, tap the price again and choose Use the best match. Choosing is for your family's admins and editors.
Specials
When the product a line is priced from is on special at your store, the line has a SPECIAL stamp and says what the deal is, such as 2 for $5 or Was $5.40. A deal on the same thing in the same size from another brand counts too; a deal on something else (ground ginger, when the line is fresh ginger) does not. Recipes with ingredients on special show in On Special on the home screen, once the saving on a recipe reaches your minimum (set in Settings > Price Lookup). If you've chosen a product for something, its specials are the ones that count.
Price history
Tap any linked product to see a price history chart. This shows how the price has changed over time so you can tell if a "special" is genuinely a good deal.
Specials look different at Pak'nSave
Woolworths and New World publish what a thing used to cost, so a special shows you the saving. Pak'nSave does not publish "was" prices at all. Its deals are multibuys, like two for $6, so that is what The Saucery shows you there. It is not missing information; there is nothing to be missing.
Searching for a product
Search from Settings > Price Lookup > Browse Prices, from a line's price on your shopping list, or when you link an ingredient. The plain product comes first: butter before peanut butter, beef mince before mince pies. Pet food, cleaning products and the like go to the bottom unless that is what you searched for.
Meat, fruit and vegetables sold by weight show their price per kilo, such as $18.99/kg. Anything without /kg is the price of one pack, and its size is shown beside the brand.
Ask Whisp about prices
Once your family has chosen its supermarket, you can ask Whisp things like:
- "Is steak on special?"
- "What's on special from my list this week?"
- "About how much will this week's shop cost?"
- "Show me what's on special that I could cook."
Whisp answers what the shop will cost from the same estimate your list shows, rather than a guess of its own.
Linking products from a recipe
You can also choose a product from a recipe, for an ingredient your list doesn't have yet:
- Open a recipe and tap an ingredient.
- Tap Link to Product and search for the matching product.
You can link staples to products from the staples management screen too.