Why this exists

A big “SALE!” sticker often isn't a good price — it's just a sticker. After one too many of those, I started checking flyer prices against Statistics Canada's published average for the same item. A lot of “sales” weren't below it at all.

Lowtein does that check automatically. It reads this week's advertised grocery prices in your city, normalizes everything to the same unit, and compares each price against an independent benchmark — the government-published average where one exists (Statistics Canada, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), plus our own week-by-week price history. You get a straight verdict: below the average, around it, or pricey. When the data is too thin to be sure, we say nothing rather than guess.

Who makes it

One person in Windsor, Ontario — the city the first page pointed at. Lowtein now covers cities across Canada, the United States, Australia and the UK, but it's still a one-person project: the same pipeline that checks Windsor's flyers checks London's supermarkets.

The prices themselves are never generated or estimated — every deal on every page links back to the retailer's own flyer or product page, so you can verify any number yourself in one tap.

What Lowtein is — and isn't

• Free, with no accounts — ever. It loads straight to your city's deals. No sign-up, no app, no list to fill out.
• No sponsored placements. No retailer pays to rank. A deal leads the page because the math says it's the cheapest, and the verdict comes from the benchmark — not from anyone's marketing budget.
• Honest about uncertainty. Items we can't price per-unit show without a verdict; cities with too little data get no “store of the week”; ties stay ties. Understating beats overclaiming.

The full data pipeline — sources, normalization, baselines, and what gets excluded — is written up on the methodology page. Our monthly city-by-city numbers are published as the Grocery Price Index (CC BY 4.0 — free to cite with a link).

Press

• Notebookcheck — “This neat free tool uses government data to tell you if your grocery store's ‘sale’ is actually a good deal” (June 2026).
• Boing Boing — “Website tracks protein meal deals” (June 2026).

Writing about grocery prices? The Price Index data is free to use with attribution, and city-specific numbers can be pulled on request.

Spot an error?

Tell us: contact@lowtein.com — include the city and the item. A real person reads it, and reported issues have typically been fixed within days. Readers catching a mislabeled item is part of how the data stays honest.