Last December, a joint investigation by Consumer Reports and the Groundwork Collaborative revealed something that most shoppers had long suspected but couldn't prove: the price you see on your grocery delivery app may not be the price the person next to you is seeing. Instacart's AI-powered tool, Eversight, had been running hidden pricing experiments on hundreds of thousands of shoppers. The same basket of groceries. The same store. The same moment. A difference of up to 23%, and potentially $1,200 a year more out of your pocket.

Instacart ended the program within two weeks, under pressure from the FTC, multiple state attorneys general, and twelve members of Congress. They said they'd stopped. But here's the question nobody could answer: if you wanted to verify that, where would you go?

That question is exactly why Stretch exists.

A $1.8 Trillion Industry With No Source of Truth

Grocery is a $1.8 trillion industry in the United States. Ninety percent of American households still shop in physical stores. Eighty percent go inside; another ten percent use curbside pickup. And yet, unlike travel (where you'd never book a flight without checking Google Flights first) or real estate, where Zillow gives you a price anchor before you ever speak to an agent, groceries have no universal source of truth.

You drive to a store you hope has what you need. You look at a price tag and think: "Is that right? Is that a good price?" You have no idea. And that information vacuum is exactly what retailers, delivery platforms, and AI pricing tools have been quietly exploiting.

Andy first identified this problem in 2013. He built basket.com, a grocery price comparison platform that helped 650,000 families, crowdsourced pricing from 118,000 stores, and mapped 2 million products. The pandemic ended that company. The problem it was trying to solve didn't go anywhere.

"We were right, but we were early," Andy said on a recent episode of the Venture Step podcast. "In 2025, the opportunity was just glaring me in the face — and it was maybe an even better one."

What changed? The Instacart scandal made the information asymmetry visible. Suddenly, millions of families realised they weren't just dealing with rising grocery prices, they were dealing with prices designed to extract as much as possible from each individual shopper, calibrated to how much brand loyalty or desperation an algorithm detected in their behaviour.

Feeding your family is not a choice. Surge pricing on a rideshare makes sense,  you can take the subway. But you cannot opt out of eating.

Your Scout at the Store

Stretch is built on a simple premise: the shopper deserves the same intelligence the retailer has.

Before you leave the house, you upload your grocery list to the app. Stretch looks at every nearby store, comparing prices across 28 retail chains and more than 25,000 locations, and tells you which store carries everything on your list, and what the total will cost at each one. One store might come in at $110. Another at $130. The closest might be $150. You might still choose proximity. But now, you choose. That's the difference.

The app learns your preferences over time, building what the team calls a "digital pantry", so it can proactively alert you when the items you regularly buy go on sale. Integrations with Siri and Alexa are in development, so adding to your Stretch list becomes as natural as asking a question out loud. Recipe integrations are on the roadmap too: turn a meal plan into a priced shopping list, attached to real inventory, at the best price near you.

The Stretch team is also watching the regulatory landscape closely. Legislation is beginning to require companies to disclose when an algorithmic process has influenced the price a customer sees. That's a step forward. But disclosure is not the same as transparency, and transparency is not the same as agency.

Walmart has Sparky. Amazon has Rufus. For the 90% of households those platforms weren't designed to fully serve, you have Stretch.

The grocery industry has had a long time to get comfortable with information asymmetry. Stretch is ending it, one shopping list at a time.

Learn more at stretchgroceries.com.