With an eye on the food allergy community as a unique group of consumers since 2008, we're on a quest to find and share ways to continue enjoying the good things in life.


26 May 2009

Grocery Flyers plus Allergen Info

In an effort to tighten the belt, I registered on mygrocerydeals.com a few years ago. It's a website which aggregates grocery market or supermarket flyers. You enter a minimal amount of personal information, the most critical being your zip code, and you're then able to view all of the special deals and sales listed in local supermarket flyers, by food category or by store. At some point, I fell off the penny pinching wagon, life got too busy or something, and I stopped using that website. When I visited the website today, I remembered it offers a feature to flag common food allergens as well as a few restricted diets so that an additional symbol is included in your results; in the case of food allergens, you'll see an exclamation point indicating products containing or possibly containing a major food allergen. Red exclamation point for foods containing the allergens you flag, and yellow for potentially containing.

I am curious to know how the folks at mygrocerydeals.com determine what gets a yellow. Red is easy to figure out--for us, peanuts and/or tree nuts need to be in the ingredient list. Yellow is "may contains" and either means the food contains other major allergens or maybe indicates that there are other products by the same manufacturer which contain the allergens I've flagged. Maybe I will ask the mygrocerydeals.com folks exactly how they determine what a "may contains" is.

My conclusion for now? Mygrocerydeals.com is a useful site for finding deals at the grocery store with a potentially helpful allergen filter. Hats off to them for the attempt to provide allergen info, but you still need to read the label yourself just in case and do your double-checking.

1 comment:

Lynn said...

What a useful tool! I am going to check it out; thanks! I avoid anything with a "may contain" label at this point, so I'll flag generously. Most of our allergens are top 8, although we do also have sesame, so not sure if that will be in there. I love to see sites trying to help those with allergies.