This neat free tool uses government data to tell you if your grocery store's "sale" is actually a good deal

Most grocery store sale stickers are just marketing, not math. A new tool called Lowtein is trying to fix that — by checking weekly flyer prices against official government averages for your city.

The tool has been built by an independent developer who goes by u/barneycorp on Reddit. The site covers hundreds of cities across the US and Canada. Every week, it pulls meat, fish, dairy, and egg prices from local store flyers, normalizes them to a common unit ($/lb, $/100g, $/dozen), and then compares each price against government benchmarks — Statistics Canada in Canada, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the US. What you see is a simple label on the aforementioned groceries: below average, around average, or pricey.

"Most sites show you a low price, not whether it's actually low," the creator explained in a Reddit post on r/InternetIsBeautiful, which quickly picked up traction.

The difference does matter. A "$2.99/lb" chicken breast looks like a deal, but if the regional average is $2.80, it isn't one. Lowtein scans those gaps, and flags standout deals that are 30-50% below regional averages, which tend to be the ones actually worth planning a grocery run for.

There's no login, no app, and no list to fill out, which is great. You can simply open the site and your city loads automatically. As an example, for Vancouver this week, pork shoulder is available at Walmart for $1.98/lb — 54% below the B.C. average. In Los Angeles, El Super has chicken leg quarters at $0.77/lb, 55% under the West Coast average.

It's a small, well-executed idea that does exactly one thing and does it cleanly (especially with that UI). You can check it out at lowtein.com.

A free site that checks whether your grocery store's "sale" is actually below the average price — using government data, for your city (US & Canada)
by u/barneycorp in InternetIsBeautiful