ChatGPT came up with the title

Weekend Web Experiments: Smarter Grocery Shopping

Sometimes, the most interesting projects come from solving everyday frustrations; this was not one of them. I rarely use this, and it was more of an experiment in web scraping and LLM integration. So, over the years, I have built a couple of web tools to see if I could make shopping easier with personal grocery planners for Fred Meyer and Trader Joe’s.

Fred Meyer Navigator

The Fred Meyer planner is all about the store’s layout, maximizing speed and efficiency! It visualizes the store layout and maps item locations within the store (based on personally gathered data), and then generates an optimized shopping route. Tell it what you need, and it tells you the most efficient path through the store. It can even split lists for multiple shoppers. In the image above, you can see it splitting the list for four people. No more wandering aimlessly!

Trader Joe’s Price & AI Planner

For Trader Joe’s, I focused on price and a bit of AI smarts. I reverse-engineered an unofficial Trader Joe’s API to pull item info and prices. The planner shows your list with real-time price calculations. But the fun part? It includes , thanks to a little LLM integration using Ollama ¹ . It’s surprisingly good at suggesting items based on what you’ve already added! You can even give it a recipe or some ideas, and it will put together a list of ingredients to add to your shopping list.

Vanilla JS & Practical Web Dev

These planners were built with good old vanilla JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Reverse-engineering the API was a fun challenge, and playing with LLMs for practical suggestions was fun. These weren’t meant to be complex projects; they were just functional weekend experiments for everyday problems.

Key Contributions

Developed web-based grocery planners for Fred Meyer and Trader Joe’s to enhance shopping efficiency.
Implemented store layout visualization and route optimization for Fred Meyer shopping.
Integrated an unofficial Trader Joe’s API for price tracking and incorporated AI-powered grocery list suggestions.