Andy Ellwood started his first company at the age of 12. It was a lawn care business in suburban Texas, run with the rigor of a proper operation: mapped routes, tracked customers, assumed sales. He convinced his mother - who homeschooled all four kids - that running the business counted as his entrepreneurship class. By his senior year, he was making nearly as much per summer as most people earned after graduating college.

What he was actually learning, without knowing it, was how systems work and who benefits from them. That instinct - the habit of asking one more question, of looking at any situation and finding what is actually controllable - took him from lawnmowing to selling life insurance at 23 (Rookie of the Year, more policies sold than any other 23-year-old in the country), to selling private jets for Warren Buffett's aviation company, to the early days of the app economy, where companies he helped build were acquired by Facebook and Google.

"The future is already here - it's just not evenly distributed," Andy said on a recent episode of the Legacy All Stars podcast. It is a phrase he has carried with him for years, and it is the founding logic behind Stretch.

The Information Gap That Was Never Closed

Consider where information parity already exists for consumers. Buying a flight, you check Kayak before you commit to anything. Buying a car, AutoTrader tells you what dealers are actually charging before you set foot in a showroom. Buying a house, Zillow anchors your expectations before you ever speak to a realtor. Prescription drugs now have GoodRx. Fuel has GasBuddy.

In every one of those categories, a company identified an information imbalance - one side knew the price, the other was guessing - and built a tool to close it. Markets became more efficient. Consumers made better decisions. In many cases, prices improved.

Groceries never got that moment. And groceries are the category American households buy most frequently, with the least pre-purchase information available to them.

The numbers tell the story clearly. Grocery profit margins have nearly tripled over 20 years - from around 0.6% in the early 2000s to 1.7% today, with a record 3.0% peak in 2020. Prices for food at home rose 29.4% between March 2020 and December 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When Stretch surveyed more than 1,000 shoppers across 47 states last year, 84% reported being stressed about the cost of food. That is not a fringe concern. It is the defining financial pressure on the majority of American households right now.

Your Grocery List Has Been Flying Blind

Most American families are within five miles of ten to twelve different grocery stores. Almost none of them comparison-shop before deciding where to go. They pick a store they trust, or a store that is convenient, and they hope the prices are fair. There is no Kayak for groceries. No source of truth. Just the price tag in the aisle and no frame of reference for whether it is reasonable.

Stretch changes that. You upload your grocery list before you leave home. The app compares your full basket - not individual items, but the total shop - across 28 retail chains at more than 25,000 locations near you. It tells you which store has everything on your list, what it will cost at each one, and which direction to drive. Turning left instead of right out of your driveway might save your family $30 this week. Over a year, those decisions add up to more than a thousand dollars.

The platform also builds what the team calls a digital pantry over time - learning your preferences, tracking the products you buy regularly, and alerting you when they go on sale. Siri and Alexa integrations are in development, so adding to your Stretch list becomes as natural as speaking out loud.

The Person Who Parts the Crowd

Andy has a phrase for the purpose behind all of this: make room for many. It comes from Emerson - 'There is always room for a man of force, for he makes room for many' - and he illustrates it with a scene from The Princess Bride, where Fezzik the Giant walks ahead of the protagonist through an impossible crowd, clearing a path nobody else could open.

At Stretch, that ethos is built into the product. The platform is designed for every shopper - the family stretched thin at the end of the month, the household where time is the scarce resource, and everyone in between. There is no income threshold for wanting to know whether you are being charged fairly for food.

The grocery industry has operated inside an information gap for decades. Stretch is closing it, one shopping list at a time.

Learn more at stretchgroceries.com.