Inflation is still on a steady rise across the U.S., With the U.S. Labor Department reporting an increase from 3.4% in August to 3.7% in September.
While the uptick is a nationwide issue, Ohioans are also feeling the pressure of higher prices and tighter budgets.
That includes Air Force Veteran Bill McCormick of Beavercreek. He is currently shopping for a family of five which used to cost around $100 a week, now their weekly grocery budget is closer to $130 or $150.
“I think over the past five years, they've gone up over 22%. So that's a huge increase for people that are already struggling," McCormick said. "And so that's the big reason that I created it, is to help people.”
That's where the idea for Dishcount came from. McCormick said he used to spend his Sundays scouring Kroger, Aldi and Meijer ads for weekly discounts and following up on the deals to try to find recipes that could accommodate his family's needs.
"At the time I thought there has to be something that connects these two and there wasn't," he said. "So then I saw what AI could do, I started tinkering with it. And then after about a month and a half of kind of going through different iterations, the first version of Dishcount was created."
Dishcount is a free website that collects grocery store deals based on user zip codes and creates easy recipes from the ingredients that stores are offering deals on. It currently covers Dayton, Cincinnati, Columbus and Pittsburgh where McCormick is originally from.
While it has only been live since March, McCormick said he is working on improving multiple aspects of the site including expanding recipes to meet even more dietary restrictions.
The site currently accommodates vegetarian and pescatarian diets but McCormick said he is working on including vegan recipes.
"The kind of parameters on that are a lot more strict than vegetarian so I didn't want to advertise it and then it give bad information," he said.
Those parameters are set by an AI system which McCormick said is not always a crowd pleaser. But for the time being, its the most accessible and reliable way to compile deals and write recipes.
”People, rightfully so, they say we don't want AI created recipes and I completely understand that," he said. "And I've looked through different options and one day eventually I want to be able to either buy a license to a recipe library or work with stores work with creators things like that.”
The site has grown from one user a day to 1,000 users a week on average. McCormick said while it costs him around $75 a month to provide consumers with the free resource, he thinks it is unfair to charge users for a resource that was made to save them money.
"I'm not gonna charge you users to create an account or to get special features," he said. "Because there are a few websites like Dishcount out there that are doing not the exact same thing, but similar things, and they're five bucks a month. And at that point I don't see a reason for it."
McCormick said he plans to develop shopping commissions from stores to fund the site longterm so he won’t always have to pay out of pocket to help his community.
"Hopefully as more people use it, it becomes more popular and then we get that tipping point where brands, stores will start saying, 'Hey, can we have Chef Boyardee featured,'" he said. "So that would be like the long term goal is to get kind of that critical mass of users that we have so many people using it every week that the brands say, 'Oh, this is a thing that people are using. Let's, let's try to help out.'"
