You don't need a smarter model to make food cheaper. You need to delete a middleman.
That's the whole argument. Everything below is just the receipts.
The tax nobody votes on
Open any grocery or delivery app. The first three results aren't the closest store, or the cheapest one. They're the ones who paid to be there.
That's not an accusation, it's the business model. Delivery platforms commonly take 15–30% commission off every order. Sponsored placement is its own line item on top of that. None of it comes out of the platform's pocket, it comes out of the price you pay, baked quietly into the menu before you ever see it.
Multiply that across every grocery store, every restaurant, every small food business that wants to be findable online, and you get a strange situation: the discovery layer, the part that just tells you a store exists and what it sells, has become one of the most expensive parts of the entire food supply chain. Not farming. Not logistics. Being found.
Take that tax out, and prices don't need a subsidy to drop. They just drop, because the markup that was funding it isn't there to fund anymore.
We think that number is north of 30% for a meaningful slice of the market. Call it a working thesis, not a peer-reviewed study, but it's the kind of thesis you can actually go test, because the fix is small enough to build in a weekend.
The fix isn't AI. It's a map nobody owns.
Here's the uncomfortable part: the technology to remove the discovery tax isn't new, exotic, or AI-shaped. It's boring. It's:
- A public list of where stores are and what they sell
- A way for anyone to read that list without paying for the privilege
- A way for store owners to edit their own listing for free
That's it. That's the whole disruption. No model, no inference cost, no API bill. A map and a catalog, both open, both free to read and free to write.
This is exactly what we open-sourced last week with the
Fork it. Point it at your city. Tell us what broke.
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