Article by Brett McAteer

Sandy Harper handles the grocery budget for her family of eight in Tucson, Arizona. “Our youngest is one and our oldest is ten,” says Sandy. “Saving on groceries is very important at our house.” But with six children, Sandy doesn’t have time to hunt through stacks of supermarket flyers looking for bargains. Instead, Sandy is a member of a web site called mygrocerydeals.com. She found mygrocerydeals.com early in 2008 when she was searching for ‘grocery deals’ and that was the last time she needed to run that search. “I use mygrocerydeals.com every week to quickly scan for the best prices on the items on my list and to watch for especially good deals.”

In Oak Lawn, Illinois, Ann Hayes has four boys in private school. “I never miss a chance to save on groceries,” says Ann. She uses coupons and will look at the flyers that land on her doorstep but she prefers the time-saving convenience of mygrocerydeals.com. “It’s no different than somebody taking the inserts and circulars and flipping through the ads and kind of making a list,” says Ann. “[I've] never been real good with lists and doing things that way. This way, it’s just the technology does it all for me.”

That technology is mygrocerydeals.com, launched in 2004 by co-founders Paul Davis and John Scott. The two had been building and operating internet and technology companies for several years. Along the way they developed a strong sense of how to deliver value through the web. With mygrocerydeals.com, they set their sights on delivering some of that value to the largest group of consumers in the world: grocery buyers.

Both Scott and Davis have backgrounds in research and several years of experience with online survey systems. With many consumer product companies as their customers they gained valuable insight into the grocery business where the coupon is a standard promotional tool. The two watched closely as coupon sites started to spring up on the web but they weren’t convinced. They believed that the coupon clipping sub-culture was much smaller than the market they wanted to help. “Coupon clipping, the filing and organizing and scheduling; all of that takes time and dedication,” says Scott. “Many families have trouble finding that time.” Scott and Davis felt that there was a need for a web-based grocery savings comparison service that was fast and easy to use; one that could every grocery shopper could use to save money.

They began the research, starting with a review of their own families’ grocery shopping methods. They realized that it was all about the deals in the flyers, the supermarket circulars in the weekend papers, the weekly specials. They were all using the flyers to tweak their weekly grocery shopping trips according to the stores offering the best prices. More formal research revealed that nearly eighty percent of American households do the same thing. Their vision for mygrocerydeals.com became clear.

Davis and Scott envisioned a service that would capture the grocery savings flyers-all of them, from coast to coast-and make them available online for quick comparison. With that key information in place, they knew from their own grocery shopping behavior that users of their service would want a way to create a grocery shopping list and a way to match the items on the list to the best prices in the weekly flyers. Most important, the founders knew that their customers would want to use these services every week, fifty two weeks of the year. With the experience, the expertise, and a compelling vision, they went to work with a team of technology and business professionals to build mygrocerydeals.com.

Mygrocerydeals.com is a free grocery savings search engine web site that has become a weekly destination for 250,000 members. Every week, mygrocerydeals.com captures and organizes the specials, sales, and deals in the flyers published by more than 25,000 stores across the country including Alaska and Hawaii. Visitors to mygrocerydeals.com use their email address and Zip Code to create a unique, password-protected membership account. Members can see every flyer deal at every store in their region or they can narrow their search to find only the deals at their favorite supermarkets and food stores. “Mygrocerydeals.com has been called the Google of grocery savings,” says Davis. “And that is a great way to understand its power, but it is much more than that.” Davis calls mygrocerydeals.com a complete grocery savings system where members create and save their grocery lists and use the powerful search functions to match the items on their list to the best prices in the flyers. “They print the grocery shopping list right from the member account and they’re off to the stores to stock up and save.”

In addition to the grocery shopping list and grocery savings search engine capability, mygrocerydeals.com serves up a full complement of grocery coupons. “Our coupon clipping members love the chance to save twice,” says Scott. “The first savings come from the flyer deals and a second helping comes from coupons.” Scott points out that stockpiling of freezer and non-perishable grocery items is an increasingly important budgeting technique and the combining of flyer pricing and coupons is an increasingly popular way to stretch the household dollars.

Ann Hayes of Oak Lawn, IL has been a member at mygrocerydeals.com since 2007. She believes that using mygrocerydeals.com saves her at least fifty dollars each week. “If I’m going to buy something, I can find which store has it on sale at the cheapest price,” says Anne. “At least I know, at the very least, I’ve saved something.”

Sandy Harper pushes her savings to another level. She combines coupons and the best deals on mygrocerydeals.com and gets many items for free. “I have more than twenty-four rolls of paper towel in my cupboard and I got them all for free,” she says. “Before, my weekly grocery bill was more than three hundred dollars but now it is less than one hundred and twenty dollars.”

Scott and Davis offer a rough calculation. “If every member of mygrocerydeals.com is saving as much as one hundred dollars every week, we could be helping American householders get twenty five million dollars worth of free groceries every week,” says Scott. “Not bad at all,” adds Davis.

The site was formally launched in 2004 and the company continues to add features to help members manage not only the family budget but also the family’s well-being. “Mygrocerydeals.com is the only grocery savings site that gives premium members integrated access to complete nutritional information and allergy alerts,” says Davis. Davis and Scott both believe that saving money should never mean compromising good eating habits. “Mygrocerydeals.com brings all of the important decision-making information into one easy to use service,” says Scott. “The food items, the favorite stores, the best prices, the label data on nutritional content and ingredients, and the critically important allergen warnings are all here at mygrocerydeals.com.”

The founders and their team are proud of their creation but they attribute most of the success to the members of mygrocerydeals.com. “Our members guide us,” says Davis. “Members choose the features they want us to build and tell us about the stores they want included.” The site boasts more than a quarter of a million members and the number of new members registering every week is on the rise. Television stations and newspapers as far apart as New York City and Southern California have also taken notice in recent months. “Media coverage is just great exposure,” says Davis, “but again, it is the membership spreading the word to friends and family that makes us feel most proud. When people are eager to share the great grocery savings search engine they found on the web, we know we are getting it right.”

For mygrocerydeals.com, getting it right means more of the same. The company’s goal is to attract one million members. Scott and Davis think that goal may be reached sooner rather than later, in part because of current economic conditions. “No one planned it this way but this is certainly a very, very good time to be saving all you can on your groceries,” says Davis.

“And we’re proud to be helping,” says Scott.

About the Author

Brett McAteer writes for and about consumer technology companies.