What I’ve Been Up To

Try-It-Out Tuesday: Roaming the Aisles with Favado

Considering groceries are one of the largest discretionary expenses for the average consumer, and that the couponing craze is still going strong, it comes as no surprise that new grocery and coupon apps regularly launch. In fact, you can choose from over 1,200 varieties in the Apple store right now.

As a single twenty-something with an always-changing schedule, I’m horrible at grocery shopping. With no plan to adhere to, and little motivation to cook for one, I either waste money on groceries that spoil, or spend too much of it on dining out. While I’m keeping myself full each week, I can’t say the same for my wallet. That’s why I decided to take a look at one of the newer grocery savings apps – Favado by Savings.com.

Favado aggregates all of the ongoing sales in your nearby grocery and drug stores. You can either plug in your zip code or manually search for a store, and if it’s in the app’s database, you’ll be presented with a list of the store’s current sales. In addition to the search component, you can create shopping lists derived from what’s on sale, “heart” products as your favorites and even be notified when those flagged favorites are on sale in the future.

I downloaded the free app to my iPhone (it’s also available for Android) and searched for the nearby Favado-friendly stores. My local Walgreens made the list.

When I took Favado for a spin in my Walgreens shopping cart, I was pleased to see consistency between what the app said was on sale, and what was actually on sale in the store. One of my go-to cleaning products, Clorox Wipes (originally $2.99), was on sale for $2.50 (two for $5). For my new bad habit, diet soda, the app had a special of three Pepsi 12-packs for $12 (originally $4.99 each) correctly listed as on sale for $4 each.

For extra savings, the app also has a coupon feature that shows you which coupons are available for your sale items. But as I pulled it up in the cereal aisle, I was disappointed to learn that the coupons are print-only. If you’re a planner when it comes to groceries – unlike me – then perhaps Favado’s coupon feature will be useful for you. But it’s a bust if you’re already out shopping. The more time I spent with Favado, the more I realized I’m not the type of shopper who’s going to get the most out of this app.

“We built it so that there are different kinds of people, there are the super-couponers, who want to do all of the work, find out what’s on sale, match up a coupon to it and only buy what’s on sale…but, not everybody wants to go through all of that,” said Loren Bendel, CEO of Savings.com. “Other people might just want to show up at the store and see what’s on sale right now, and make sure you don’t miss a really great sale.”

While Favado claims its “secret sauce” to be its ability to gather all of the sales in nearby stores, allowing you to compare store prices against each other, I think the app is particularly interesting because of an old-school meets new-school tactic. Behind the app are 80 plus grocery bloggers scouring the circulars and aisles for the best prices and “secret sales.”

“By secret I mean it’s not advertised,” Bendel said. “When you get your circular from a grocery store that shows all of the sales, that’s only about 20 percent of what’s on sale in that store – the rest is not advertised and people don’t know about that unless someone is walking the aisles and finding those sales.”

Knowing that actual people are walking up and down the aisles to get the information – not just robots extracting it from the Internet – is rather comforting.

Overall the app is easy to use, and I can see how it could save a certain kind of shopper both time and money in the aisles. The key phrase here is certain kind of shopper. But though I haven’t mastered the art of planning ahead when it comes to groceries (yet), this app did spark my interest in being a more proactive shopper. If you’re working toward the same goal — or you already have meal planning down to a science — this free app is worth a try.