For decades, my mother and grandmother have both religiously scanned the weekly coupon books and circulars that arrive in the weekend newspaper. While clipping coupons can be tedious, grocery stores’ weekly deals can often take out a significant chunk of change of the weekly food bill. Of course, as print couponing becomes obsolete, many consumers are looking to the web for deals at their local grocery stores. Today, Y Combinator-backed AnyLeaf is launching its intelligent grocery deal aggregator to the public.
AnyLeaf scours local grocery store sites in the San Francisco Bay area and aggregates all the deals from these stores, including CVS, Lucky, Nob Hill, Raley’s, Safeway, Target, and Walgreens. You simply enter your zipcode and email address, and AnyLeaf will send you a weekly email with deals from the local grocery stores near you.
And what sets AnyLeaf apart from other grocery store deal aggregators is that it applies an intelligent algorithm to sourcing deals for users. You can specify that you don’t want to see deals on specific food items and products, and after your start interacting with AnyLeaf’s site, the service will start recommending similar items to those you have chosen to see deals for. And AnyLeaf collects historical prices for food items and will also show you how steep a discount is compared to past discounts from grocery stores.
For now AnyLeaf is limited to the Bay area but plans to expand to other cities in the near future. For any Trader Joe’s fans out there, AnyLeaf doesn’t aggregate deals from the popular grocery store chain because the company doesn’t post sales publicly on the Trader Joe’s site.
Personally, I would pay more attention to grocery deals at the stores where I shop if I received comprehensive lists of weekly deals via email. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Chicago is AnyLeaf’s next expansion!
