You are standing in an aisle holding a jar, or in your own kitchen looking at the last one in the cupboard. The question is the same: is this a good price, and is it cheaper somewhere else?
Typing "Coles brand smooth peanut butter 500g" into a search box is the slow way to answer that, and it is the way that lands you on the wrong pack size.
Point the camera at the barcode instead. About a second later you are on that exact product's page, with every retailer that stocks it, what each one charges, what is on special, and the full price history.
Scan a barcode
ProLeggo's Tomato Pasta Sauce 500g
- Coles$5.50
- Woolworths$6.00
- Aldi$5.25
Reads the barcode on your device — no photo is taken or uploaded. Coles and Woolworths; Aldi publishes no barcodes.
Two things to know before you rely on it. It is a Pro feature, and it needs a camera, so it is a phone feature rather than something you can use on a laptop.
Getting a clean read
Line the barcode up inside the bright band in the middle of the viewfinder. Only that strip is read, which is deliberate: it keeps the decoder off the rest of the shelf.
Two things help more than anything else:
- Fill the band. A barcode occupying most of the width reads almost instantly; one held at arm's length often will not read at all.
- Avoid the glare. A curved, shiny pack under supermarket lighting is the hardest case. Tilt it slightly rather than moving closer.
If the camera is not cooperating, Type the number instead takes the digits printed under the barcode and works identically.
Worth doing once before you need it: install Grovena to your home screen, and on Android or a computer a long press on the icon opens Scan a barcode with the viewfinder already up.
"We read it fine, but nothing came up"
This is the message worth understanding, because it does not mean the product is missing from Grovena. It means nothing in our catalogue carries that barcode, which is a different thing.
Barcodes come from the retailers' own product pages, and they do not publish one for every item. So a product can be perfectly well listed, priced, and comparable, while the barcode you just scanned is not attached to it.
Search by name instead. It is the reliable path in this case, and it will usually find exactly the product you were holding.
A scan that finds nothing still knows the brand
A barcode is not a random number. They are issued to companies in blocks, so the numbers either side of the one on your jar were almost certainly handed out to the same brand, and we can read that much off a barcode we have never seen before.
So a scan that matches nothing is not a dead end. We look at the block it came from, show you the neighbours we do recognise, and when the numbers line up closely enough to be sure whose they are, we name the brand and offer everything we list from them in a tap.
These are the brand's other products, not the one in your hand, and we will not pretend otherwise. Think of it as being walked to the right shelf rather than handed the jar: from there the pack you are holding is usually one tap away, with every retailer that stocks it priced side by side.
Aldi own-brand will not scan
This one is permanent, so it is worth knowing rather than rediscovering at the shelf.
Aldi does not publish barcodes for its own-brand products, and almost everything in an Aldi trolley is own-brand, so in practice scanning does not work there.
Coles and Woolworths are the opposite: we can scan very nearly everything.
For Aldi, search by name. The comparison itself is unaffected. Aldi prices sit on the product page alongside the other two chains exactly as they always do. Only the scan shortcut is missing, and it is missing because the data does not exist to build it, not because we skipped Aldi.
What leaves your phone, and what does not
The picture never does. The camera feed is decoded on your device and discarded as it goes: no photo or video is taken, uploaded or stored, and the camera runs only while the scanner is open.
The barcode number does reach us, because that is the lookup. We keep a daily count of how many scans succeeded, found nothing or could not be read, which is a total rather than anything tied to your account. Where a barcode matched nothing we keep that number on its own, so we know which products to add. Numbers from successful scans are not kept.
The full version is in our Privacy Policy.
Why your iPhone asks for the camera every time
On an iPhone or iPad you will be asked for camera access once each time you open Grovena, even with it installed to your home screen. Nothing is broken, and there is no setting of ours that remembers it.
Safari hands out camera access for one visit at a time and forgets it when the app closes. That is Apple being careful with your camera rather than us losing your answer, and it is not something a website is allowed to override.
Within a visit it only asks once. Scan as many things as you like, switch to typing a number and back again, and it will not ask a second time.
On Android and on a computer the browser remembers the answer, so you are asked once and then not again. Installing Grovena does not change this either way. It is the browser's decision, not the app's.
If you would rather not be asked at all, Type the number instead never touches the camera and finds the same product.
If a scan sends you somewhere unexpected, or a product you can see on the shelf will not come up by name either, tell us. A missing barcode is something we can fix, and a wrong match is something we want to know about.