Anyone shopping for groceries in Canada knows how disheartening it can be. With prices seemingly rising all the time, trying to save a few dollars at a checkout is becoming a challenge.

Enter North Bay Ont.-based One Red Maple Inc., which looks to make grocery price shopping a little easier for Canadians seeking to reduce their food bills.

One Red Maple’s Gofer.run mobile app lets Canadian shoppers input a shopping list and the app will compare prices on the items across multiple grocery stores in their local shopping areas. 

The app is free to download for iOS and Android.

Mark Sherry, co-founder of One Red Maple, said the Gofer.run app came about from a trial of an earlier app project made to compare Amazon products to the same products from local retailers, driving sales to those local business and away from Amazon. That was launched in 2022

“We were not getting the traction we wanted,” Sherry said in an interview with TechNX. “We were probably a bit too early.” 

While that app may not have gained traction, the underlying methodology of product matching proved valuable when Sherry and his team turned to the grocery space.

“We started looking at the grocery space and realized that there is a large opportunity of providing real-time information to help consumers make better [shopping] decisions,” he said.

‘Trivago’ for groceries

Like the popular hotel price comparison app Trivago, Gofer.run compares grocery items in a shopping list across regular and sale prices, and analyzes each item by unit cost, such as per 100 grams or 100 millilitres. 

If a customer is looking for the best price on ketchup, Gofer.run’s algorithm will search across the multiple different brands of ketchup being offered at the stores, and it can then break down that list to the size or even the brand name of ketchup the shopper is interested in, Sherry said.

“So if you are looking for the best price for a 100 millilitre bottle of Heinz ketchup, the app will help you find the best price across the stores in your area,” he said.

Once a shopping list is created, the app allows shoppers to either shop at one store or set up multiple stores to find the best price across the stores for the items on their list. Sherry added while individual items in a person’s shopping list may not always be the cheapest at one of the stores, the app can calculate the lowest total basket cost based on whether the shopper wants to go to multiple stores.

The savings can be significant. Sherry gave an example from a user in Vancouver who was comparing prices on flour. When looking across multiple stores in their area and comparing prices of flour across multiple sizes of flour on offer, the user found the savings accrued over several shopping days was significant for that single product.

“Two dollars here, three dollars there, one dollar here across multiple stores, all of a sudden you’re saving a lot over a month,” Sherry added.

Gofer.run generates strong interest

Sherry said since the soft launch of the app last week, some 4,800 Canadians have downloaded the app, an impressive number as One Red Maple has not yet begun advertising.

“Most of that has just been word of mouth and the press we have been getting,” he added. “We hoped to have reached 1,000 active users by the end of March. We have blown past that.”

He said he looks to have 10,000 active users by the end of March based on the interest he sees right now. 

While tackling grocery inflation is proving a successful strategy, Sherry is looking to expand into other consumer categories in the future, home insurance and mortgages being two examples.

“Your insurance is coming due for your house, so you put your home details into Gofer.run and it finds you the best insurance rate,” he said. “Your bank is soon to renew your mortgage. We can go and find the best mortgage rate for you.”