This Genius ChatGPT Grocery Hack Is Going Viral on TikTok & Can Even Help Lower Food Costs
If your weekly grocery bill causes you anxiety, then you’re not alone. Food prices are out-pacing inflation right now, according to CNBC, with items like milk, bread, and other basics up 28% since before the pandemic. Claudia Sahm, a chief economist at New Century Advisors, told the outlet, “Once food price goes up, it tends to stay up.” (Note: president-elect Donald Trump’s alleged plan to enact tariffs on other countries will “massively make things more expensive, especially food,” Rakeen Mabud, chief economist at Groundwork Collaborative, told CNBC.) Luckily, TikTok has many ideas to help offset the cost, one of which, we are definitely going to try in our family! All you need is the AI app, ChatGPT.
TikToker Ejay Hernandez (@ejayisgay) shared the hack this week, captioning the post, “This has saved my life and my wallet, let me save yours!” In the clip, he explains how to do the grocery hack, which he claims “is a lifesaver.”
“Go into ChatGBT and you’re gonna say, ‘Make me a grocery list for this store,” he continues, adding that it can be Target, Trader Joe’s, or wherever you do your shopping. “And you’re gonna say, ‘with a budget of, I’ll say, $70, that can make me three meals, breakfast, lunch and dinner, for two weeks.”
Hernandez also suggests adjusting your request to include specific meals that you might want to have on certain nights or to request meals that are “protein heavy” or have “not a lot of carbs” or dietary restrictions if you need to. After making the request, ChatGPT does all the hard work (other than picking up the groceries, of course.) And if you don’t like something in your meal plan, you can tell it! The AI will “find you another item that the store has, and it’ll show you the price, and it’ll adjust it based on my budget.” So you don’t even have to think on your feet! It’s brilliant.
After having used this hack himself, Hernandez says it’s “pretty accurate” and has only been over budget “one or two dollars.”
“It just… It saves my life,” Hernandez gushes in the clip. “And I think everybody should start doing that.”
The video (which already has a whopping 7.6 million views on TikTok!) is already inspiring people. “THIS is what AI is for,” one person commented. Someone else said, “I did this yesterday and I actually spent under my budget ????”
“u actually SAVED MY LIFE,” someone else wrote. “I want YOU to know that I’ve heard people talk about chatGPT for years but THIS POST made me download the app. ❤️????????” another person said.
Sure, we could do the work ourselves of making a budget, shopping around for products, meal planning, and figuring out which products to buy within all the constraints. But that can be overwhelming, and it’s easy to go over budget. (Especially if you shop inside Target!) Using this ChatGPT hack will help prepare us before the store, maybe give us new ideas or ways to stretch our cash that we didn’t think of, and make food suggestions that will take the guesswork out of meal-planning.
Hopefully this hack works as well as Hernandez says, because it sounds like a game-changer!