Second in a series of retail grocery articles focused on what government and business can do to help consumers make wise shopping decisions.

Technology has helped create apps to help consumers identify allergens, find vegan choices, breakdown nutritional information, create customized grocery lists and turn recipes into grocery lists.

It should be able to make unit pricing information easier to achieve in store and online— if there is a will to do so.
Unit pricing is the practice of displaying the prices of items using a set unit of measurement, like weight or volume, so consumers can compare different sized packages to determine the best deal.

An informal review of the smartphone apps of major grocery store chains show that they do generally include unit pricing of items, but do not yet allow the ability to filter or sort by unit prices.

There are third-party smartphone apps that allow consumers to access prices from multiple nearby retailers. One leading provider is Flipp, but that app typically does not display unit prices of the grocers that match a customer’s search. It may display unit prices for retailers that make unit pricing part of their standard weekly promotional flyer, but it does not enable consumers to easily identify the local retailer with the lowest unit price on a selected product.

Perhaps, until unit pricing is required and not voluntary, apps that search multiple grocers and identify optimal unit prices will remain rare.

Ian Jarratt, a leading advocate of unit pricing worldwide, notes that many smartphone apps adopt the problematic practices of retailers in designing their displays of unit pricing.

“Display is often not good, small and not located close to the selling price. Units of measure need to be the same,” Jarratt said. “There needs to be a products search function that only produces a list of relevant products or a second search function that allows you to pick products out of the initial list and then sort them by unit price.”
Inside Canadian grocery stores, the next wave of technology to hit is electronic shelf labels, a digital readout of prices that allow retailers to quickly update the shelf price displays. The process makes updating prices faster and less costly, compared to having a clerk manually update each item’s price label.

The flexibility of the electric labels could give retailers the ability to improve their presentation of unit pricing. But some initial examples suggest the first wave of electronic labels could have some of the same shortcomings of their paper equivalents: unit pricing displayed in an incredibly small font and meaningless units of measure being selected.

QR codes, meanwhile, may someday replace bar codes on product shelves and provide another opportunity for consumers to learn more about products – including unit pricing – with a tap on a device.

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Consumers expressed strong support for unit pricing in a series of questions about store pricing in a recent online survey of more than 4,500 Canadians by Consumers Council of Canada conducted through Environics Research.