GroceriScout: Terp Edition

A Python-based tool that uses Selenium and BS4 to scrape grocery product names, prices, links, and images from grocery stores based in the general College Park area.

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Inspiration

Everytime you walk into a grocery store, you always wind up going over budget, whether it's from your favorite food price rising, or your little sweet treat putting you $1.99 over budget (us too...). Now with the tool we developed, you can feel assured in the fact that the price you pay for is the lowest price possible.

What it does

Using Python webscraping libraries like BS4 and Selenium, paired with grocery website's built in search algorithms, we scrape the site for important infomation like the product name, price, image, and an external link for easy access. Then we display the information in a table so the user can compare prices for common items like milk, bagels, eggs, etc.

How we built it

Our webapp is built HTML/CSS, JS, and Python with Flask serving as the backend.

Challenges we ran into

Scraping from Trader Joe's website specifically was difficult because the products often didn't align with the search term. Additionally, we found that TJ doesn't host their images online so images couldn't be scraped like the Lidl's data.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We accomplished a MVP within three weeks.

What we learned

New tools such as Git, home-brew, new frameworks such as Flask, and new libraries such as Selenium and BS4.

What's next for GroceriScout: Terp Edition

With more time, we hope to add more grocery stores to our web app, improve the price comparision UI, and increase number of stores you can compare at one time.

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