How to Stretch Your Groceries w/Andy Ellwood

0:05Andy Ellwood:Welcome to the Wealthy After 40 podcast, the show for Gen X women and couples who are ready to ditch financial stress and feel confident about retirement. I'm your host, Dailene Higgins, a money coach and retirement strategist to help you gain clarity and confidence with your money by creating a spending plan that aligns with your financial goals and dreams so you can spend intentionally, save consistently, and feel at peace about your future. Join me every week to understand your money, simplify your decisions, and take intentional steps toward the life you want.

0:51Andy Ellwood:Andy Elwood is the founder of Stretch, a new AI platform reimagining how families navigate the grocery aisle. A serial entrepreneur behind companies acquired by Facebook and Google, Andy has built everything from global learning communities to purpose-driven tech startups. His philosophy, Make Room for Many, guides his work as he uses technology to create more access, clarity, and opportunity for everyday consumers. I'm excited to bring Andy Elwood onto this podcast to help you learn how to stretch your groceries. Welcome to the podcast, Andy. Welcome, Andy. I'm so excited to talk about this new app of yours to introduce it to listeners, as I know we have all been consumed and being consumed by grocery prices.

1:44Andy Ellwood:So I'm going to start off the interview with this question. What was the moment you looked at grocery shopping and thought, this is the problem I need to solve? I became, it was when I became a dad. and I was buying a lot of things that I hadn't bought previously over and over again and depending upon which store I went to in my neighborhood, they were different prices. And then you start to add up, I wasn't ever going to the store for one thing, I was going to the store for multiple things. And all of a sudden I'm like, what's the right combination of things to buy at this store versus this store?

2:20Should I buy it at this store that says it's cheaper but this other one has discounts and coupons and this one has a loyalty program? And I just was like, Like the information is all here. It's just not organized very well. And I was thinking about the other things that I spend money on. I would never buy a$500 flight without comparing it on Expedia. I'm going to go to Expedia or Kayak. I'm going to just check. I'm probably going to pick my normal airline because I have some status there. But if another major airline is 50 % less, I'd switch. And I think that the same thing for buying homes or buying a car or even now with GoodRx for buying prescriptions, we compare prices for most of the things that we purchase.

3:02But for groceries, we just go to a 40 ,000 square foot store with refrigerators and hope that they charge us a fair price. And as I said, for the thing that I'm spending$1 ,000 a month on, that seems like a silly thing to do. just trust that the local store is going to give me the best price for the products that I have. So I just said, what would it look like if we created a grocery companion? What would it look like if we had, what would it be like if I had a really smart friend that knew everything about groceries and all the homework and research for me? And then when it was time for me to go to the store, it told me, it gave me the answers.

3:37And so that's what we started to try and build a stretch.

3:40Andy Ellwood:Love that. I love that. So tell us just a little bit about stretch. It's what it is. And I know your tagline is don't grocery alone right so yeah just enlighten us just a little bit more about what stretch is and how it can help us yeah so stretch converts your grocery list into actionable intelligence so if you just take a photo of this week's grocery list drop it into stretch stretch will distribute every store close by that's on the platform that carries all of your products and what the total price is for your entire shopping list at each local store. And so it might be$70 over here and$84 over there and$96 there and$110 there.

4:24But the$110 store is the one that's closest to you. So if you're in a big hurry, you might go there, but you realize, man, but I could save$36 if I went to this other store. And just even being able to have a choice is a really amazing feeling that when I first saw it working for me, I was like, oh my gosh, I actually know what the trade-offs are. I know that turning left or turning right out of my home might give me the ability to save 20 bucks. And I've got a little bit of time to be able to drive maybe one block further, one intersection further to go to that store that carries basically all the same things that the closer store carries, but for 20 bucks less.

5:03And just feeling empowered and knowing that I'm in control. It's an amazing feeling that I didn't fully expect that I would feel because I'm the one who's building this thing. But then when it happened for me, I was like, oh my gosh, everybody should have this. And so that's what we're working on doing, doing our best to share it with as many people as we possibly can.

5:20Andy Ellwood:Yeah. I love that to be able to know. Yeah. Cause I have two similar stores left or right, but I have one more option left and I have several more if I go just a bit further. And so it's, yeah, being intentional maybe with grocery shopping, buying, planning, and using stretch to do that. So love that. Love that. Okay. You talk about stretch learning your list over time. So we just mentioned dropping it in there, it gives you the list, but it also helps you learn your list over time. How does it do that? And how does it personalize it for you? Yeah. So I think that every family, every grocery shopping trip starts with a list.

6:00And the very important thing about stretch is that you build a list, you don't build a cart, right? So on all the other grocery shopping apps out there, you're building a cart with very specific products, right? So it is Family Size Special K with protein berries, right? You have to pick that exact thing. In order to compare across all of the stores locally, not every store probably carries the Family Size Special K. So on your list on stretch, you just write cereal and we get to know that you mean special pay. And if it's available at the other stores, we'll show it to you. But if it's not available at the stores, we'll give you the next closest for your list.

6:42And the more that you use Stretch, the more we understand the things that are in your what we call consideration set. So when I write cereal on my list, it means special pay, it means Raisin Bran, or it means coming to Cheerios. I'm okay with any of those three if I write cereal on my list, if I'm not being specific. But there's other things that I don't really care which box of pasta, which blue box of pasta I come home with, right? As long as it's rigatoni, it's going to be okay in my family. And I'm a little bit less brand conscious when it comes to that. And so I think every family is a little bit different, right?

7:15There's probably 30 % of us that you really care about certain brands because that's your kid's favorite or that's the one that you have the most affinity towards.

7:23Andy Ellwood:And then there's 70 % of us think it's like, hey, if you could make this cheaper, please do and so we start to understand that and our shoppers are giving us more and more feedback in the process and that's been super helpful for us to just make the app that much more tailored because when it's also done i i know that i have been handed a grocery shopping list by my wife and had to guess what the item like which one's the correct one going out to the store and stretch takes away that guesswork and i had one shopper tell me that stretch was going to save her marriage. It is an unintended side consequence of building a smart grocery shopping list.

7:57Andy Ellwood:Yeah. Yeah. So bringing that up, my sister says that about her husband is when he retired and he's doing the grocery shopping and she's either deal with five calls from him or the wrong thing when she comes home. And in fact, that happened when I went out there and she's, I have a big box of Cheerios, but it's not honey nut Cheerios. And so stretch can definitely save some marriages. We include photos in the copy list. Love that. Love that. Very helpful for somebody running your errands. Who are you? I know I would even get specific with my husband because he would go and on the store app, it says the aisle and everything.

8:32Andy Ellwood:So I'd put that on there and he'd be like, I can't find it. I can't find it. I'm like, okay, you're going to have to go ask somebody now. So I love that. Okay. As the personalization happened, as this considerations start building out. What if somebody were, because I'm just thinking sometimes that happens. What if somebody all of a sudden had to do a big overhaul, either gluten-free or dairy conscious as you get kids and different things happen? How does Stretch know or work with that? Yeah. So it's one of the things that we're building right now, which is not live in the app yet, but we have this concept of being able to toggle your grocery list.

9:13So make this list cheaper. Make this list closer. Make this list get here faster. Make this list dairy free. Make this list gluten free. Try to be healthier. Want to eat more local. Different prompts, if you want to use that language, to be able to take your original list and be able to position it that way. So that's where a lot of this personalization coming in, knowing what your household goals are, is the thing that we're thinking a lot about. For some families, it's, hey, we're really trying to be healthier. Is there ways to take these recipes that turn into the shopping list and make it a healthier version by using yogurt instead of sour cream, whatever it might be?

9:49And so just thinking through those types of things is something that we're in progress with, but it will be live in the app until maybe end of summer, just think about those pieces. But it's a big part when you think about everything that's on our grocery list. You know a lot about somebody's household pretty quickly. And so we want to make sure that we're really honoring that, making sure that we're customizing it in a way that is not overstepping, but is very helpful to our shoppers in real time.

10:14Andy Ellwood:Yeah. Yeah. That's very helpful. Thinking about, I can't remember the word you said, overstepping, also thinking of big brother, right? As this information is there, do users need to be worried? What do they need to kind of privacy? If there's any, all of those concerns that might rise up. Yeah, because of the personal nature of everything we're doing, we did a lot of privacy and security work to begin with before we even launched the app. So much of this information, like I said, is very personal. You hear stories of grocery stores knowing more about their shoppers than the shoppers know about themselves.

10:51And we're very conscious about how it's used and where it gets used. But it's also, there's a certain level of things that in our onboarding process, we have to know something about you in order to be helpful. I haven't tried to walk people through, but anytime that we're asking for information, it's being used to be able to give you actionable information back. And thinking through all those privacy pieces was pretty foundational for the way that we built this.

11:13Andy Ellwood:Yeah, I like that. I like that. So then another spin on it as grocery stores. So we've got the user, all of our needs, all of our ideas, all of our information. Then we have the grocery stores. So I'm thinking, wow, this is going to be for my area, the area I used to live, my sisters, and some overlap of stores, but not a lot. How does the app handle that? Yeah, so wherever you are, when you click get recommendation or find stores, we take that list at that moment in time in that geography. Obviously, different people are willing to drive different distances for their list. We call it proximity pricing preference.

11:56How far will you drive to save how much money? Some people drive a really long ways to save$20. Other people won't drive any distance to save$20. Sometimes it has to do with day of the week, time of day, and how the kids are in the backseat of the car. If it's Tuesday at 10.30 during a school day, maybe you've got a little bit of extra time, you can drive to the store a little further. But if it's 6.30 and you're on your way home from soccer practice, I don't care how much it costs. I need these three things to get dinner on the table tonight. And so we allow you to adjust the search radius and to type in the address where you want to shop from.

12:30So if it's not exactly where you are, but it's where you're going, you can do that as well.

12:34Andy Ellwood:Yeah, that's very helpful. That's very helpful. I like that, being able to cover all of the progress. When I was at my sister's, I was just there for two weeks. I was talking with her husband about stores and the grocery stores and realizing they don't have any middle-of-the-road stores. It's so interesting. But how helpful this would be as you move, right? They have the very low and they have the very high, but your middle of the road or your locals were non-existent. But maybe they are, right? And he just doesn't know it's going to be the town southeast as opposed to northwest. So I think that's very good.

13:08Andy Ellwood:All right. So grocery budgets are a real pressure point for a lot of families right now. Families, couples, singles, I don't care. Groceries are hitting. And I always watch and see people start trying to balance a budget on groceries. And I always tell them no. However, I think Stretch could be very supportive in that. So how intentional is the mission of Stretch around economic access? And who exactly are you building this for? Yeah, since the pandemic, grocery prices are up over 30%. And for the wealthiest country in the history of the world, for us to have food insecurity in this country is something that I'm just absolutely enraged by.

13:52and very strongly working to do what we can to say, hey, prices have gone up because there's no accountability that would ever cause them to go down. And I think that's what I hope Stretch stands for, is to first give shoppers the ability to understand what their actual choices are. But then the fear that people say around pricing transparency, oh, it's going to be a race to the bottom. No, no, it's not. It's just people are going to be able to actually get the food they need to feed their families at a price that they're willing to pay. And I think that's become so much of a challenge. The big aha for me was last summer we talked to over 1 ,000 families across 47 different states.

14:36And 84 % of the people that we spoke to were planning to buy groceries differently next month than they were this month. they were consciously trading down at stores consciously trading down on brands and unfortunately in some cases trading down on nutrition and that's hard to see when there's seemingly so many good things happening the headlines about oh this is what the stock market is and things all those ones but it's not the case for everybody and i think the part that really broke my heart was that 17 % of the people that we spoke with had skipped a meal sometime in the past month so somebody else in their family didn't have to.

15:19They intentionally said, I'll sip this one out so that somebody else in their family could eat. And that's just crazy to me. And unfortunately, very nervous about the fall this year, that everything's been happening in the geopolitical world. It's affecting the fertilizer. It's affecting shipping lanes. All of that is going to affect our food costs this fall. And so we're making sure that Stretch is ready for all of that because a lot of people are really reconsidering their budgets and thinking about, man, all right, we were going to buy that steak, but maybe we'll buy ground turkey instead. We were going to buy it.

15:54And we've got holidays coming up, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, like summer things. Kids aren't in school during the summer, which means a bigger strain on families at home if they're eating at home. All of those things are happening as we speak, and it's just in some ways shining a light on just how important the work that we're trying to do is.

16:10Andy Ellwood:Yeah, that's so enlightening and so helpful. And I think it's also helpful for listeners to realize it might not just be them, right? That this is an experience worldwide. But really tuning into, I liked, I didn't like how you're saying everybody's trading down. But I think that stretch could serve, and let me know if I'm wrong, but I'm thinking from our discussion, if there's certain areas you could trade down and certain areas you could maybe try to grab that higher nutrition, right? Because it's about nutrition to avoid illness, to avoid medical costs, right? Everything's tied to everything.

16:47Andy Ellwood:I get that. So talk a little bit about how stretch could support maybe not an all or nothing. I know that's what my clients love to do is it's all or nothing. I'm like, no, there's got to be a middle of the road. Let's talk about middle of the road. Yeah, I think that when I think about the way that grocery stores are laid out, they make it easy to think about the things that you should be willing to pay for and maybe the things that you should be willing to trade down for. So outer aisle, meat, seafood, dairy, produce. Those are the things that for me, I still want to order things. I want certain things to be organic.

17:25I want to see the marbling on my meat. I want to check the expiration date on my milk, and I want to make sure I'm getting the brown eggs that my wife loves. Stuff that's on the inter-aisle, I have stuff in the aisles that's packaged, processed, canned, bagged. It's a little bit less specific, and it's a little bit more shelf-stable, so you can maybe pick something that lasts longer. There's different sizing techniques that will maybe give you a discount. All of the unit pricing is on those. So that's where I've seen a lot of people be better at. If you do have to make trade-offs, make trade-offs on the inner aisle as opposed to the outer aisle.

18:00So it's something that we're working on with Stretch. I'm thinking, going back to the personalization, we have a concept of putting your budget and telling what you're trying to accomplish this week. This is a feature, it's not in the app yet, but it's something that we're working on for the future. And the ability to just say, hey, I've got 80 bucks and I'm trying to make three dinners for a family of six this week. Here's what I already have in my pantry. What else do I need to buy? Like, how can I make this stretch? And then one of the things we were testing, actually in a conversation earlier today, was what if we said, okay, now show me what I can do for 60 bucks.

18:34They started at the toggle and say, hey, this is what the trade-offs would be. So things that we're thinking about, but there's still a lot of work to do. And so I hope that your listeners will download Stretch and give us the feedback because we read every single comment. We have everybody grocery shops. It's the universal thing, but everybody has a certain way that they like to grocery shop. And so we're doing our best to serve everybody and meet them where they're at.

18:53Andy Ellwood:I love that. I love that. So listeners, here's your action step. We're not ending this episode yet, but I want an action step. Go download Stretch. Go start to use it. I'll get Andy to help us with those first initial steps. Use it and leave the comments. Let's get this built so that we are benefiting from it, right? All of us going to the grocery store, all of us, 80 bucks for six. Holy cow. I don't know if I could do that. And then drop it down to 60. but whatever your grocery budget is, it sounds like Stretch can support you. So Andy, with them going off and doing that, where do they need to go?

19:29Andy Ellwood:What are the first steps they need to do? And what are the first action steps within the app? Yeah, stretchgroceries.com is the website. It has all the information. Also has a demo video so you can see it there. But also when you go to the app store, the download buttons are on our website or if you go to your favorite app store, Stretch Groceries, just search that and you'll see us there over the top result. and then when you sign up, you have to give us a little bit of information about you. Like, where are your locations so we can know what stores are close by and build your first list. And I always encourage people, your first list, you may not give us all 40 items that are on your list this week.

20:02Build a list with five, right? And just click get recommendation. And you'll be amazed at how much difference in price you'll see at stores close by. And if there's a store that you love that isn't already on the platform, let us know so we can add it. Because we're a young company, but we're moving fast. We're moving fast to try and solve a really big problem. and every single person that downloads the app helps us get a little bit closer.

20:23Andy Ellwood:Yeah, it is so big, so huge. I'm just thinking of everything. I have one question. It is a personal question, but I'm sure that there's other listeners. Can I take my list and then dump it? I guess I just have to copy it into a cart in the app for pickup. I don't go to any stores, right? Yeah, so we're working on those integrations as we speak. So curbside pickup and delivery are both on the roadmap for later this year. Awesome, awesome, love that. All right. So where does stretch go from here? I know you've talked about a lot of things. Do you see AI expanding into other parts of how family thinks about food?

20:57Andy Ellwood:I know we talked about a lot. So anything else you can add? Yeah, I think that when it's all said and done, we want to be that companion because a lot of times it just feels like we're all alone trying to figure this out and doing our best. And I think that my note to your listeners is everybody's doing better than they think now and you're not the only person, right? Like we're all trying to figure this out and especially in 2026 with so many things are changing and so many things are moving. There's a lot of other people who are asking similar questions to you, so don't be afraid to ask a friend or find professionals who can answer those questions for you.

21:28But hopefully Stretch just continues to become the place where every grocery trip starts. We're building Shopper first very intentionally. Look at all the crazy things that are happening, technology, AI that's being built. Most of the AI that's being built, they're being built by the grocery stores to help the grocery stores make more money. Walmart has Sparky and Amazon has Rufus. Stretch is for the shoppers. and there's a future that I can imagine where Stretch goes out and talks to Sparky at Walmart and negotiates on your behalf. He says, hey, here's what I know about the Indian family. This is what they like to buy.