Residents of Guelph, Kitchener and Waterloo came up with a new way to help individuals swiftly move in and out of the grocery stores amid COVID-19 concerns.
A team of four people spent two weeks mapping the inside of 14 grocery stores in total with six in Guelph, two in Cambridge, four in Kitchener, and two in Waterloo.
The team pulled images from google maps and visited stores to provide detailed information on exactly where food categories such as frozen dinners, packaged delis and bread, for example, are located.
“Given what’s going on with the crisis, we prioritized this as fast as possible so we’ve been pulling some long hours and the fastest way to get it out there was a website,” said founder of Spot IT's new website Caleb Opersko.
The website was officially launched yesterday.
“The goal here is to get people in and out of the store faster, minimize contact with everyone, people would be backtracking less,” said Opersko.
“We’ve done studies that show we can speed up employees drastically so we figured the same could be done for shoppers themselves.”
The website provides detailed maps of food categories in five Food Basics stores, five FreshCo stores, one Longo’s store, one No Frills store, one Zehrs store and one independent store.
Opersko said as his team's work began to get affected by the pandemic, they decided to use the extra time on their hands to support the community.
The website also provides information about COVID-19 store policies in place such as store hours, bag policies and payment options.
Opersko said if the website is well received, the team will consider transforming it into an app but for now, its prime purpose is to help shoppers stay safe as a response to the pandemic.