2025–2026
PriceWise.NYC
A community-built food price database for budget-conscious New Yorkers
PriceWise.NYC is a community database of food prices that helps people track what groceries cost across stores in New York City. By helping digitize purchase receipts and using NYC OpenData to connect prices with stores and neighborhoods, the system helps people work together to pool pricing information — making it easier to make informed purchasing decisions.
Events
I will be presenting PriceWise.NYC during NYC Open Data Week 2026 in two sessions:
Why?
Grocery price inflation has been reported on extensively, but the coverage is often abstract — averages and indexes that are hard to relate to your own shopping. It's difficult for people to see how individual item prices are changing over time, or how differently the same items are priced across stores and neighborhoods.
This opacity makes it especially hard for budget-conscious people to make informed decisions. If you don't know that the same can of beans costs $1.29 at one store and $2.49 at another three blocks away, you can't act on that information.
Unequal access to affordable food causes unequal outcomes in society. Low-income neighborhoods often have fewer grocery options and higher prices. Making food pricing more legible — visible, comparable, and trackable — is one way to help people advocate for themselves and their communities.
How does it work?
- Community members submit grocery receipts by taking photos of them
- Receipt photos are scanned, digitized and normalized to extract and structure item names, prices
- Pricing information is connected to stores and store locations using NYC OpenData
- Compare pricing information across geographies, stores and over time
- The more receipts people contribute, the richer the picture becomes