El-Basket
Egypt's real-time grocery price comparison platform — and the retail price intelligence engine behind it.
About the startup
El-Basket (الباسكت) is Egypt's real-time grocery price comparison platform. Shoppers open the app, search a product or build a basket, and see what it costs right now across the country's major supermarket chains — Carrefour, Spinneys, Metro, Seoudi, HyperOne and Mahmoud El Far. The app is live on iOS and Android, tracks roughly 90,000 products, and is built around one Egyptian promise: اعرف قبل ما تروح — know before you go.
The hard part is not the app. It is the data. Egyptian retailers list the same product under inconsistent Arabic and English names, mixed units, and variable-weight barcodes that break naive matching. We built a pipeline to solve it: a distributed collection layer with per-retailer concurrency control, a multilingual matching engine using vector search and sentence-transformer embeddings to resolve one product across chains, LLM-based structured extraction that builds a clean golden record per item, and GS1-compliant barcode normalization. The result is a normalized, daily-refreshed view of Egyptian grocery pricing that did not previously exist in one place.
That asset powers a second product: El-Basket Retail Intelligence. The same data that tells a shopper where rice is cheapest tells an FMCG brand or a retailer something far more valuable — where their products sit against competitors on price, which SKUs are discounted and when, where price shocks are starting, and how a category is moving week over week. The analytics layer runs on the live index and surfaces price dispersion across chains, category price positioning, price-shock detection, retailer coverage, and a weekly basket-level inflation measure computed from a defined staples basket: rice, sugar, flour, oils, pasta, legumes, tea, eggs, UHT milk and more. A public price index is already live at index.el-basket.com.
So El-Basket is two products on one engine — a free consumer app that earns daily usage and trust, and a market-intelligence layer for the brands, retailers and institutions that need to see Egyptian grocery pricing as it actually moves. We have also engaged Egypt's Ministry of Supply and Internal Trade and the Consumer Protection Agency, positioning the platform as a complementary consumer-facing layer alongside official price-monitoring work.
Built in Cairo, alongside BrainMatter Studio.
Industry
b2b_saas
Startup stage
Pre-Revenue
Background
Egypt's real-time grocery price comparison app tracking ~90,000 products across six supermarket chains — plus a B2B retail price intelligence layer giving FMCG brands and retailers live competitive pricing, price-shock detection and weekly basket inflation from the same data engine.
Sectors
b2b_saas, retail, food_beverage, e_commerce, ai_ml
City
Cairo
Country
Egypt
Business model
b2b2c
Target market
Egyptian grocery shoppers nationwide, plus FMCG brands, retail chains and public institutions needing live, normalized pricing data on the Egyptian grocery market.