BRADENTON, Fla. — Erika Vitiene doesn’t walk into a grocery store without a well-mapped out shopping list.
Using each week’s circulars from grocery store Publix, the Bradenton resident plans seven dinner meals for the week according to what’s on sale. Then she organizes her list by categories such as produce, meat and canned goods to save time at the store.
She’s been shopping this way for several years and has built a small online business out of her shopping strategy.
In January, Vitiene launched grocerydash.com, a subscription service where she provides clients with seven dinners that use the meat, produce and ingredients on sale that week. In addition, the website provides subscribers with the recipes, suggestions for on-sale breakfast and lunch items and a grocery list that is sorted by department.
“I socialize with moms all the time, and it just seems to be a challenge for everybody to save money and save time,” said Vitiene, who is a stay-at-home mother of two.
Vitiene started grocery shopping more strategically about five years ago when her son was born. She quit her job as a teacher at Sugg Middle School to become a stay-at-home mom but found the sacrifice required her to learn how to better stretch her husband’s income on groceries.
She’s invested about $800 in the startup to create the website, a logo and some marketing, and has about 24 consumers who have signed up for the monthly subscription, which is $4.95.
“I save between 25 to 50 percent on my grocery bill every week shopping this way,” Vitiene said.
Vitiene sees great potential for her startup to gain popularity like another strategic shopping website, CouponMom.com, which has seen tremendous growth since its inception in 2001.
Stephanie Nelson, creator of CouponMom.com, started her website in 2001 as a free service focused on helping consumers save money with coupons as well as raising awareness about food donations to hunger organizations.
Since 2004, she has appeared on “Good Morning America,” “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” “The Today Show” and CNN, and her Web traffic has jumped to 2.6 million members from 200,000 members in 2008.
“I’m seeing 10 times the interest than what it was before the recession,” said Nelson. “One of the things I’ve noticed in the recession and with the Internet becoming more accessible to people is there’s a lot of great sites like hers that are coming online to help people save money.”
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