groceries

Buycott app lets you vote with your wallet in the supermarket

Supermarkets are labyrinthine behemoths laid out in a convenient linear fashion. So where's the maze? On the supermarket shelves, of course. Food products galore stare back at us, silently appealing to our penchants for sugar, salt, and fat. We pick and choose, knowing full well what we are getting into. But it's the hidden components that are increasingly becoming a salient issue.

If supermarket shelves are overwhelming due to the sheer diversity of items, imagine the corporate structure behind the packaging. Or don't; just let your phone do it. Scan any bar code (UPC-A, UPC-E, EAN8, EAN13...) with your phone and the free Buycott app (for iOS; a previously available Android version is now "Coming soon") will display the product's corporate family tree on the screen. The app takes knowing where your food comes from further, telling you not only what brand belongs to what company, but what that company does with your dollars.… Read more

Get meal plans and grocery lists on Android, iPhone

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It goes without saying that food is important to our ability to function. Despite this importance, planning and preparing meals often falls on the back burner, with things like work or school taking priority. If you find yourself often forgetting to purchase key ingredients, or are feeling uninspired in your meal planning, check out Food on the Table for Android and iPhone. Here's how to get started:

Step 1: Download and install Food on the Table on your Android or iOS device.

Step 2: The app requires some basic setup to function. Get … Read more

How to food-shop well with Shopwell

Shopwell is a free iOS app that helps you maintain a healthy diet and is especially useful if you are allergic to or want to avoid certain foods. The app delivers ratings for a wide variety of food items specific to your profile, helping you find healthier alternatives to foods you like to eat.

Shopwell bills itself as "like having a personal dietitian in the palm of your hands" but it's more like having a monitor dispatched by your personal dietitian or doctor. The app has you set up a profile, where you tell it the types of things you do and don't want in your diet. In order to create a useful lists to shape your diet, it's probably best that you don't wing it but seek professional medical advice.… Read more

Simplify your grocery shopping on Android

Grocery shopping--it can be fun, annoying, relaxing, or done in a rush, but it is always necessary. So why not use a grocery app for your phone that can help make the process go smoother every time? While the number of grocery apps in the Android Market is mind-boggling, the amount of features per app varies greatly. Out of Milk is relatively balanced on features, ease of use, and quality in comparison to many others. Here's how to use it to simplify the necessary task of grocery shopping:

Step 1: Grab Out of Milk from the … Read more

Crave 42: Grocery robotics (podcast)

Self-service checkout is for suckers. The future of grocery shopping is a robotic clerk/bagger developed by Willow Garage. Eric and Donald also argue over the best way to spend $500, the best ball-based game machine to alienate you from your loved ones, and the cheapest X-Wing fighter ever made.

Subscribe in iTunes SD Video | Subscribe in RSS SD Video… Read more

YouTube for the boob tube

Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded:

YouTube launches a beta version of YouTube Leanback to bring the video service to your television and revamps its mobile site for easier touchscreen navigationMotorola announces the Motorola CHARM, a new Android phone for T-MobileSprint announces the Samsung Intercept, its latest Android offeringAmazon launches an online grocery store in the UKTime Magazine will stop publishing its magazine articles for free online until they are two weeks oldA new study shows that students do suffer from attention span problems after consistent exposure to television and video games

CNET to the Rescue: Reminders and to-do lists

This time, Rafe and Josh's favorite apps for keeping track of stuff. Also, we answer questions on Synergy, domain names, waking up snoozing Macs, calendar apps for Thunderbird, and more.

Thanks to Tales (from the chat room) for saving our bacon!

Grocery deal finder Grocio creeps toward launch

Grocery comparison site Grocio is inching closer to a public launch. On Monday it opened up its doors to beta users in Tulsa, Okla.

The site, which helps people comparison shop for goods at local grocery stores, is still a long ways from being available nationwide. Its methodology, though, is sound. Each week founder Gerald Buckley sends out scans of the latest grocery circulars--yes, the ones that turn Sunday's paper into a phonebook-size behemoth, to Amazon's Mechanical Turk. Once there, they're transcribed into text files that Grocio's search engine can use to do its magic.

The whole process takes about two hours. After which, users can see how much the items on their grocery list would cost, then pick out the lowest-priced store--complete with any coupons that they'd need to print out and bring with them.

Getting that pricing and coupon information from the circulars is not exactly the fastest or most cost-effective method, but so far it's been one of the only ways to play. Buckley says that since its launch, grocers have perceived Grocio one of two ways: some have gladly handed over the latest pricing information, while others look at the service as a threat--something that could chase away potential customers.

Despite the fact that most shoppers aren't likely to go across town to pick up the other half of their shopping list, some grocers worry that Grocio's system means they won't come at all if they're getting an all-around better price elsewhere.

Part of Buckley's strategy at winning both sides has been to start low, and to play them off each other. He's gunned for the "value-leaders," or stores that are running big sales on what they're selling. Getting these stores into the system means shoppers will have to compare those prices to the higher-margin competition, who in turn have to step it up to get noticed.

To augment that, last month Buckley introduced… Read more

Basic nutrition tracker

Mealformation is a multifunction food tracker that allows users to create meal plans, track their food intake, and analyze their nutrition. Overall it is a solid program, although some aspects of it could be more intuitive or better explained.

The interface is fairly straightforward, with various functions--personal profile, a food database, a recipe database, and so on--organized in tabs. The thing that threw us about the program is that it's never made clear what content is included and what content has to be user-generated. It turns out that the program does contain a fairly large database of foods, meaning … Read more

Talk to the shopping list

I'm a list guy. I have lists everywhere. I have stacks of them all telling me to do various things. Pay the bills, deal with the DMV, feed the neighbor's cat--stuff like that. These scraps of paper litter my house from end to end. A quick survey reveals that most of them seem to be grocery lists. I know for a fact the word "eggs" is scrawled on at least half a dozen pieces of paper, yet my refrigerator houses none of them. What's the problem? I always forget my shopping list.

While the SmartShopper Deluxe … Read more