GTA grocery comparison

What “real cost” means

Most price-comparison tools rank by shelf price alone. In the GTA that's a trap — a 25 km drive to save $0.50 on a jug of milk costs more in gas and time than the saving. Shelfbee ranks by real cost:

real cost = shelf price + driving distance + your time

Retailers we track in the GTA

• No Frills — Full catalogue; priced per branch.
• Real Canadian Superstore — Full catalogue.
• Loblaws — Full catalogue.
• Your Independent Grocer — Full catalogue.
• Fortinos — Full catalogue.
• Walmart Canada — Flipp flyer data (anti-bot blocks direct scraping).
• Food Basics — Flipp flyer data.
• Shoppers Drug Mart — Wired but on a slower cadence.
• Costco — Flipp flyer data; membership requirement labelled at the price level.
• Longo's, Highland Farms, Fortinos, Sobeys, Metro, Galleria, Dollarama and others — Live flyer data via the Flipp aggregator.

Prices refresh weekly every Friday morning after Thursday flyer drops. The freshness chip on every result tells you exactly when that price was last verified.

How we price per neighbourhood

Some retailers price per-store, not per-chain — a $4.99 milk at a downtown Toronto branch can be $5.49 at the same banner in Pickering. So we track one representative branch per zone and attribute prices only to branches in that zone:

• Downtown Toronto — Toronto core, M-postals
• West GTA — Mississauga, Brampton, Oakville (L5-L6)
• North GTA — Vaughan, Markham, Richmond Hill (L4, L6E-L6G)
• East GTA — Scarborough, Pickering, Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa (L1-L2)

The trade-off: we track a branch per zone instead of one price per chain, in exchange for prices that don't lie when you live in Whitby and the only listed branch is in Vaughan.

What we cover

Four categories: grocery, pharmacy, baby, household. Roughly 1,500 high-velocity items at full coverage; ~300 today with weekly additions. Not electronics, not home improvement.