I’m absolutely terrible at saving money at the grocery store. Having grown up surrounded by gadgets, the idea of tearing through page after page of those weekly grocery store mailers seems about as savvy as getting all of my news via smoke signal. Nine times out of ten, they go straight from my mailbox to the recycling bin.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been using the Y-Combinator backed grocery deal aggregator, AnyLeaf. The idea of it is pretty simple: those mailers? AnyLeaf digs up digital copies, aggregates all the data, sorts all of it by category, and then highlights the “hot” deals (based on historical prices). In the past month alone, I’ve saved a few hundred bucks, and my fridge is stocked better than ever.
Up until this point, using AnyLeaf while actually at the store (to look at a list of saved items, for example) has… kind of sucked. The site is a bit wonky to use on the iPhone, and pushin’ around a grocery cart with my iPad in the child seat makes me feel like a gigantic bag of tools. Fortunately, AnyLeaf’s got a new iPhone app that ought to make bargain-hunting on-the-go a bit less painful.
The iPhone app packs just about everything found on the site, squeezin’ all of the categorical sorting and hot-deal finding into a much more mobile-friendly format. The best feature, though, has to be the shopping list view. You can build up your list from the comfort of your full blown PC, then just hop into the app to view that same list at the store. It’s a pretty simple idea, but it makes the entire service a whole lot more useful.
You can find the (free!) app in the App Store right over here.
(Note: Heads up, non-Californians: Looks like AnyLeaf is a Bay Area-only thing right now.)
