Build an automated grocery price tracker

Download the desktop app from claude.ai/download, install it, and sign in. A paid plan gives you more headroom for daily automated runs.

Then switch into Cowork mode — the part of Claude that can work with your files, control your browser, and run tasks on a schedule. When it asks, let it use a working folder; that’s where your lists and reports get saved.

Install the Claude in Chrome extension, sign in with the same account, then open your store’s website (e.g. yourstore.com) and log in yourself. Claude reads the store through the session you’re already signed into — it never needs your password.

Set your store location while you’re there, so the prices it reads are the ones you’d actually pay. Claude only reads what’s on the page: it won’t enter passwords, place orders, or check out for you.

Ask Claude to plan the meals and pull out everything they need — for example: “Give me a week of budget-friendly recipes with serve counts and full ingredient lists, then combine them into one shopping list using products I can actually buy at my usual store.”

You’ll get a set of recipes, the amount each one needs, and a single list mapped to real products (like “Beef 3 Star Mince 500g”). Ask Claude to save it to your working folder — this list is the backbone of the tracker.

A baseline is just a snapshot of today’s prices, so future changes have something to measure against. Ask Claude to “look up the current price at my store for each item on my list and save them as my baseline prices, dated today.”

Want per-meal costs too? Have it divide each recipe’s ingredient cost by its serve count. That gives you a baseline cost-per-serve for every meal — the number your daily report will track.

Now automate it. In Cowork, ask Claude to “create a scheduled task called grocery price tracker that runs every morning at 8:10am: open my store, read each item’s price, compare to my baseline, recalculate cost per serve, and write a short report of what changed, today’s cheapest meals, and any specials.”

Claude saves it as a recurring task with your list and baselines baked in. Each morning you get a tidy rundown — price moves, your cheapest meals right now, and deals worth grabbing — and you can change the time, the items, or the format anytime just by asking.