Today, many are starting to look for alternatives to the current social networks that collect too much information about your person. More specialized social networks with more narrow focus are appearing – networks that are good at one thing and don’t collect information on your entire life. Learn more about Grosh – the social food network!
From small networks
The intelligent grocery shopping app Grosh lets you collect your recipes and organize your grocery shopping. However, until now there’s been no real connection to other users using the app, except you got benefit of crowdsourced information like grocery prices and probably shared the shopping list and recipes with your spouse. But a network of two is a really small network!
To social food network
When we first started out on Grosh, we did a bunch of “problem” interviews to pinpoint what people were struggling with related to grocery shopping and cooking. One of the problems was lack of inspiration for your daily cooking. We’re now pleased to take our first step into this area with Grosh. By following friends, you can see what recipes they’re adding or bookmarking, and what people they are following for inspiration. This is shown on the Inspiration tab of the Meals screen – and just swipe the recipe or person to bookmark or follow. You manage users you follow from the Settings screen. Start following users you know to get inspiration!
Other new features
Besides Grosh becoming a social food network, there are various changes in version 2.5:
- Explanation of features inside the app
- Improved grocery information
- Improved stock management
- New options while entering grocery details
- New translations
Read more about this below.
Explanation of features inside the app
When you sign up for a free Grosh account, we’re sending out 4 welcome mails that introduce various core features of the system. Grosh may look simple on the outside, but it’s actually by far the most advanced grocery shopping and stock management app available. However, not everybody has time for to read the mails, so we’ve now built in a new section in the app with these introductions – have a look at Menu – Introductions 🙂
Improved grocery information
One of the things that make Grosh great is the community of users that enter data into the system that other users benefit from. However, the current system is struggling a bit with barcodes, as only one barcode can be assigned to a grocery. So if a user associates a barcode with milk, it might overwrite another barcode added by another user for milk. Until now, the system has encouraged users to describe groceries fully when adding them to the system from a barcode – but this has not not really been happening. And if you did so, there was a downside – the automatic stock management was not really working!
In the new version, when you scan a barcode and the item is unknown to Grosh, you must specify which specific grocery variant the barcodes applies to. Apart from the grocery name, variant information includes organic or not, brand name, size and unit (eg cornflakes can have the variant Kellogg’s 750g). As a minimum, the brand must be specified. This ensures multiple barcodes can be associated with a grocery. When adding e.g. milk to a shopping list by scanning a barcode, you may choose to use the variant information on the list. However, you can also turn this off under settings for the shopping list. Do so if you do not care which variant is shopped – eg any brand of milk is ok.
Improved stock management
Instead of using different groceries embedding brand name, organic etc, we suggest you use the uniform grocery name and specify additional grocery details using the new variant fields.
If you do so, Grosh has a much better chance to manage your stock automatically. Grosh will treat purchase of different variants as a whole, so buying different variants of milk can be summed up and consumption and calculated current stock will be much more precise 🙂
You can learn more about the automatic stock management here: https://groshapp.com/faqs/how-does-grosh-know-what-i-need/
PS If you’ve got stock lists – you can correct current lists to use the variant fields as well, but you don’t need to do so. Before renaming the grocery name, just specify brand and size/unit – and when prompted by the app if you’re correcting a spelling mistake, answer Yes.
New options while entering grocery details
You may fill in variant information for groceries that have not been added by barcode to the list. Do so by entering the details screen for a grocery. Then tap the expand button to the right of the category selection field to show the additional variant fields.
The system comes loaded with various brands and units. You may type any brand name into the grocery details screen and the system will create a new brand if no existing brand exists in the system. Units is a pick list filled appropriately, but you may change the list under Settings. Both Brands and Units work similarly to stores and categories. You can have own brands/units or use the global ones, which you may hide if so wished.
New translations
We’ve recently been launching Grosh in various new countries, but we haven’t forgotten our existing users 🙂 The app is now re-translated for German, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish speaking users.
Other minor changes
- Do multiple scans without going back to list – if you’re scanning several items eg then adding to a stock list after returning from the store, just turn on “Scan one more item” on the scanning screen
- Keep awake toggle – under Settings, you can turn off the ability for the app to dis-engage the screen lock
- Meal plan notes – you can add a note to a planned meal, eg. “Bob for dinner”
- New illustrations here and there, thanks Emma 🙂
- And then, we’ve also fixed a bunch of bugs.
What’s next?
We’ve got many new products and improvements underway that have been developed in parallel to Grosh 2.5 – keep a lookout for launch announcements about
- Grosh extension for Google Chrome web browser – easily bookmark recipes and items on shopping lists
- Grosh for Apple Watch – use the watch to have both hands free when shopping
- Fromto – a sibling app to Grosh that focuses on gift shopping and we aim to make it the best app for your wish lists and helping friends and family coordinate shopping
We’ve also started work on Grosh 3.0 which will get an extensive make-over of the user interface. If you’re already a Grosh user and got suggestions, now is the time to send your input related to this!
Kind regards
The Grosh Team
