Food, Grocery, and UPC Databases and Information

I’ve maintained a spreadsheet on Google Drive with details of a variety of groceries and related goods that we purchase for a while, containing information on the brand, product description, size, price paid (and a few “regular price” entries if I know I got it on sale), SKU/EAN/UPC, store, city, date, and notes.  In some ways it’s an unfortunate and disappointing look back across how bad inflation has been under Obama (for anyone who makes the claim that it’s not worse according to government statistics… those stats are all “ex food and energy”… the two things that actually matter!).  Aside from being interesting, it’s useful to track not only the change in prices over time, but where and when I’ve made purchases at the best price, so I can quickly look up whether I’m getting a good deal on something.

Typically I will add entries to my spreadsheet when I’m going through my receipts and doing categorized expense tracking.  There are pros and cons to this approach, and while my method could probably be improved with discipline, it has worked fairly well for me thus far.  I’ll discuss these pros and cons briefly, and touch on a couple of online tools I’ve run across that are beneficial in my tracking process.  On occasion I will also add to the list based upon a price I’ve seen advertised or if I run across an item while shopping at a store I don’t frequent so I can compare it to prices at my regular venues.

I try to keep all my receipts until I have a chance to sit down and enter them into my accounting/expense tracking (I use KMyMoney for this).  For our regular grocery shopping, I usually break receipts down into subcategories such as food, personal care, household supplies, alcohol, gifts, etc.  It’s uncommon for most of our receipts to fall into a single category, especially if sales tax is a part of the purchase, as I maintain an expense categorization for it as well.

As I mentioned, I find several advantages to my particular method of tracking.  First, since it is sometimes months before I have or make the time to sit down and process receipts, I’m sometimes unable to remember what a particular purchase was from just the description on the receipt.  In some ways, this is also a con, but with some of the tools I will describe below, it ends up working out fairly well – if the receipt includes a UPC code.  While looking up the product to see what it is so I can categorize it, it’s easy to add it into my spreadsheet at the same time.

Since I often have a large quantity of receipts to go through at once, it becomes fairly efficient to load up the sites I typically work with and establish a flow or rhythm.  It’s still not a fast process, but as with most tasks, it becomes quicker with practice and repetition.  I go through the receipt, do my lookups as needed, categorize the items in my accounting application, and mark the receipt to be shredded or filed as needed.

This tracking isn’t without downsides, chief among which is the time consumed by the process.  It generally consumes the biggest share of a weekend to enter and allocate two months of receipts.  I’m not sure I can completely justify the time yet, largely because I haven’t really utilized the data in value determination yet (which is in turn due to the incompleteness of my dataset to this point, so a self-referencing problem).  Sometimes it can be difficult to find necessary or accurate information, especially when UPC codes are not present.  And there are times when it is challenging to determine how to best categorize or itemize the data, or to later find the correct product information if I did a poor job of categorizing initially.

I’ve recently started making an effort to “coupon” (which I place in quotes, because I can’t see myself at this point actually putting the effort into it that true couponers do), and I hope this will lead to a greater return on my time investment thus far and going forward.

For stores that include the UPC as part of the line item on the receipt, the Internet UPC Database has proven incredibly valuable in providing information about items with unclear descriptions.  Wal Mart is one of these stores, and the UPC Database proves especially helpful in this regard as it provides the ability to look up the UPC check digit (the last digit of the UPC, which is not included on the Wal Mart receipt) and then provides a link to the product description.  I also recently discovered Factual, specifically their consumer packaged goods dataset which contains not only information about what a product is, but also provides the added bonus of nutritional information and ingredients.

I should note that the UPC Database is built with user contributed data (much like Wikipedia), while Factual’s dataset appears to come from manufacturers, though I haven’t done research to fully vouch for this.  I do find the idea of an open source/community sourced database potentially very beneficial, and have considered doing something similar with the data I’ve collected.

While mobile, I have also used the Grocery Tracker application on my Android phone to great benefit in keeping track of both my grocery lists and prices in the stores where I shop.  This application is incredibly thorough, and I probably don’t use a tenth of what it can do.  The inventory system looks very cool, but would require a lot more discipline and consistency than I can typically muster.

Finally, I use both store sites that can be searched by SKU (such as Sam’s Club) and Google when the information is not available by other means.  If nothing works out, I will leave a product out of the spreadsheet and/or leave it uncategorized in my accounting.