Grosh is a shopping app that crowdsources lots of things, including the global dictionary of grocery names. As many users add the same item, it gets promoted to the global list of dictionaries. Unfortunately, this also means new items with the same meaning as existing items propagate into the global list. This makes it hard for Grosh to understand purchase patterns and provide good suggestions to what you need to shop.
To avoid this, we’re cleaning out the grocery dictionaries so everything has the form “grocery name” + “adjective” e.g. milk skimmed. But as we’re using full search in the app, you can just start typing “skimmed m” and see a match for “milk skimmed” and tap that. To keep the system tidy, we’ve also introduced a check for synonyms on all new items. This means you can no longer add a new product if a synonym product exists.
Besides making the list of items shorter when adding new items, the clean up has other benefits such as enabling us to provide insights into the most purchased items etc.
Grosh also does some processing of qualities at the front of the grocery name. You’re supposed to enter the amount of a grocery in front, e.g. 1 or 2 of something.
Grosh also does some processing of variant information inside the grocery name. If you enter “2kg potatoes” or “potatoes 2kg”, “potatoes” is added to the list along with variant information 2kg shown in brackets. Other variant information includes the brand name and organic indicator, so that you may add “potatoes eco” to get potatoes added with the “eco” flag set in brackets.
Finally, Grosh also does some processing at the end of the grocery name, as it looks for store name and price. If it finds a store name, that’s removed from the item name and added as a tag to the item instead. The same applies to a all-numbers word at the end of the grocery name. Example: “potatoes lidl 3”, means the potatoes cost 3 which is added as a price together with lidl as a store tag.
Note: You can always use the note field for special comments on a grocery item – the note field is all yours and is always unaltered. You may fill in the notes field when entering the grocery name by adding a comma – everything after the comma is treaded as a comment.
