Key Takeaways

• Grocery shoppers don’t all start from the same place. Three distinct habits emerged: Menu Makers start with meals, Routine Shoppers tend to buy the same things each trip, and Value Optimizers start with sales and savings.
• Value mattered more than convenience. Shoppers overwhelmingly favored price transparency and personalized savings over features designed primarily to make shopping easier.
• Shoppers want relevant savings, not simply more coupons. Alerts for products they already buy, easier price comparisons and personalized deals were among the things most likely to influence shopping behavior.
• Grocery apps aren’t necessarily solving the budgeting problem. 63% of grocery-app users and 64% of loyalty-offer users cited budgeting as a frustration.
• Different shopping mindsets need different tools. Treating grocery shoppers as one audience risks creating experiences that don’t work particularly well for any of them.

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I needed validation.

At the end of March, I lost my job, so my husband became the only one working, which was stressful for both of us. With more free time, I tried to help by taking on more household errands, like grocery shopping. And, like many a sitcom father before me, I was struggling.

Since he works nights, my husband has done most of the grocery shopping for years, taking advantage of the quieter hours during the day. Over time, he built a mental model of prices across our local stores. I was missing all of that historical knowledge.

So, I handled it the way only I would: I built a Python scraper to collect sale prices for the products we buy most frequently, then created an AI prompt to parse the data and help me figure out how to stock up at the lowest prices with the fewest stops.

While my days were mostly filled with resume submissions, interviews, and half-assed attempts at thought leadership in my industry, I was Mr. Momming my way through the grocery aisles.

This wasn’t my first frustration with grocery shopping. I’d already been thinking about the disconnect between how grocery stores sell ingredients and how customers actually decide what’s for dinner.

This time, instead of just wondering whether my own shopping habits were unusual, I decided to ask. Was I the only one frustrated by the status quo?

That question became the basis for this survey and report.