What lowtein does

Every Thursday morning, we pull the weekly flyer from each major grocery chain that serves your city. We extract the price, item name, validity dates, and source link. We normalize prices to a common unit (per pound for meat and fresh produce, per litre for milk, per 100 g for cheese and pantry staples, per dozen for eggs) so different retailers' pack sizes can be ranked side-by-side. Then we show you the cheapest.

Where the data comes from

We poll every major grocery chain that publishes a weekly flyer in your area — national banners like No Frills, Real Canadian Superstore, Metro, Sobeys and Walmart alongside the regional ones your city actually shops (Save-On-Foods out west, Super C and Adonis in Quebec, Atlantic Superstore out east, T&T and Shoppers Drug Mart's food deals where they run flyers). Not every chain operates in every city — what you see is what's actually available where you are.

Every price links back to that retailer's own flyerpage. You can verify any claim by clicking the source link. We don't republish flyer images or compete with the retailers; we just point you at the deals they're already publishing.

Is this really the cheapest?

For each cut, we show you the entire ranking — tap a row to see every retailer we polled for that cut this week, with their prices. If we're cheapest by $1, the other retailers' prices are right there to verify. If we missed a retailer your city has, email contact@lowtein.com and we'll add them.

Is the price actually good?

When you tap a row, the expanded panel shows two independent reference points:

• Statistics Canada provincial average— the province-wide monthly retail average for that cut (for your city's province), pulled from StatCan Table 18-10-0245-01. Updates monthly, free open government data under the Open Government Licence — Canada.
• Our weekly trend — the lowest price we observed across all retailers each week since we started tracking. Sharpens with every Thursday refresh.

The two answer different questions. StatCansays "is this cheap compared to what people in your provincetypically pay?" — our trend says "is this cheap compared to recent weeks at the retailers we cover?" Together they make the savings claim falsifiable.

No AI guessing

Prices on lowtein are pulled directly from each retailer's structured flyer data. No model is inferring or guessing prices. Where a flyer lists an item with no clear per-unit weight (e.g., a tray priced "$15" with no gram count), we drop it from the comparison rather than estimate.

What's limited

• Some flyers only list app-only deals (Metro eOffers, PC Optimum point deals). We capture the regular weekly flyer; in-app member-only deals don't appear here yet.
• Pricing changes happen mid-week occasionally. We refresh every Thursday morning, so a Wednesday markdown might not show up until next week.
• Price history is short — we started tracking in May2026, so "typical" comparisons get sharper every week.
• We rank by published price per unit. We don't weigh in on quality, freshness, or store conditions. We're showing arithmetic, not a recommendation.

Produce & pantry

Beyond meat, fish and dairy, we now track fresh produce (bananas, apples, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers and more) and pantry staples (rice, pasta, peanut butter, tofu, dried lentils). Where the government publishes an average price for an item — Statistics Canada covers most of these, the U.S. BLS a subset — the same below-or-above verdict applies. Where no official series exists, the item shows its price and ranking with no verdict rather than a made-up benchmark.

Our price history

We record every price we see, every week. That history powers two honest signals: an item can show that it's below its usual price at that retailer, and a deal that beats the lowest price we've ever tracked for its category earns a stock-up tag. The stock-up rule is strict on purpose: a price that merely ties the usual low is a standing price, not news — only genuine new lows qualify, and only after we've tracked a category for at least six weeks.

The same discipline applies to the Store of the week verdict on each city page: it counts which store is outright cheapest in the most categories that week — and when two stores tie, we show nothing rather than crown a winner by coin flip. Monthly, the whole dataset rolls up into the Lowtein Grocery Price Index — city-by-city basket rankings, free to cite (CC BY 4.0) with a raw data download.

Free, no accounts

Lowtein is free. We don't require an account, and we don't sell your data.