Food-Ka

Food-Ka is an independent aggregator of grocery prices across Quebec. It gathers 22,000+ products from major banners — Metro, Super C, IGA (Voila), Maxi, Provigo, Walmart Canada, Costco Canada — and specialty grocers like Avril, Mayrand, Maturin, Giant Tiger and T&T Supermarket. Every product carries its current price, regular price, a comparable $/100 g unit price and a direct link to the banner's original listing, so shoppers can spot real deals without opening half a dozen store sites, each with its own navigation and format.

Grocery chains offer no webhooks, so Food-Ka reproduces the equivalent: one dedicated connector per banner (24 active out of 30 banners surveyed) visits each site via server-rendered HTML, open JSON APIs like Shopify products.json and the WooCommerce Store API, Loblaw's __NEXT_DATA__, or Scrapfly and Firecrawl for anti-bot sites. Everything is normalized to a single Product schema, a content-hash diff engine detects new products, price changes and delistings automatically, and every price variation is historized in a price_log table — sales become traceable. Adding a banner is auto-discovering and takes roughly 30 lines of Python.

A FastAPI backend serves filtered search (category, banner, brand, price range, on-sale), sorts by price, unit price or discount, plus facets, a source registry and stats endpoints. The frontend is a React 18 + Vite + TypeScript PWA with an editorial-sharp design — Space Grotesk type, lime accent, real-time ticker — and cross-banner product comparison on every product page. In production, three PM2 processes (web server on port 8096, a 6-hour sync watcher, and the tunnel) run on MacLustr cluster node M4M64b, exposed through ngrok at www.food-ka.com.