Doom scrolling {{ FIRSTNAME }}? An LA court found Meta and YouTube guilty of building addictive platforms and ordered them to pay one young woman $6M (R102M) in damages for her social media addiction. 😳

In This Open Letter

SA's grocery basket is up 34% in five years – but the sticker price isn't even the real problem anymore…

The average SA household food basket hit R5'383.81 in February 2026, up 34% from R4'001.17 five years ago. But there's a sneakier force at play.

Shrinkflation: It’s where pack sizes shrink while shelf price stays the same, and it means the number on the tag doesn't tell you what you're actually paying. Globally, studies show consumers react far less to size reductions than to price hikes, which is exactly why manufacturers do it. 

And in SA, it's been all over the socials: A box of 36 Beacon marshmallow Easter eggs went from R59.99 in 2020 to as high as R115 in 2026, while the eggs themselves got smaller.

We showed you how fixed logistics costs make smaller packaging more expensive per unit in our Sonke Retail piece. The missing piece was a consumer tool that catches it in real time.

The local app calling it out

Grocify is a free grocery app built by Ethan Stander that compares prices across Checkers, Pick n Pay, Woolworths, Spar, Shoprite and even Dis-Chem and Clicks. Now, we've recently seen other grocery aggregation apps, but Grocify's sharpest feature sits underneath the comparison layer.

It shows you the price-per-100g and per-100ml, which helps strip away the packaging illusion. Think: 500g bananas at R4.40 per 100g vs 1.2kg at R2.75 per 100g. Same product, same shelf, 60% more expensive per unit. That's the kind of thing the label alone won't tell you.

On top of that, Grocify factors in the cost of driving to the store (you set your vehicle type and fuel), so "cheapest store" actually means cheapest after petrol – not a small thing with a potential R5–R10/litre diesel hike coming in April.

No ads, no login, no tracking, and your data stays on your phone.

Built by Ethan Stander in his spare time, the app got 20’000 users on Android, and everyone’s been waiting for an iOS version. Well, that wait's now over as Grocify just hit the App Store.

As pack sizes shrink and sticker prices lie, tools that show the real price per unit aren't just nice to have – they're becoming essential.

We're watching this space…

Have your say…

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