Methodology

How we rank, and where every number comes from

A ranking you cannot audit is an advertisement. So here is the whole method, including the parts we do not know.

1. How products got on the list

The shortlist came from a curated brief covering roughly twenty everyday Indian grocery categories. Where the brief named a category rather than a product ("hummus", "unflavoured sparkling water", "plain low-oil makhana"), we picked the specific SKU that best fits the category's stated intent and labelled it as a finalised choice on the product page.

Each entry was then matched against Blinkit's public product catalogue, published in Blinkit's own sitemap (crawling of which their robots.txt explicitly allows). 95 of 106 products resolved to a real Blinkit product page, which is where their product image and canonical name come from.

2. Where the nutrition numbers come from

Tea is the one exception, and it is deliberate. An Indian tea pack declares nutrition per 100 g of dry leaf, which nobody consumes. The five teas here are described per 100 ml of the brewed cup with no sugar and no milk, taken from reference composition data rather than the pack. That is the basis a drinker can act on — and it is why all five show near-zero macros and the same Nutri-Score B. Unsweetened tea is nutritionally close to water; what separates these products is residue testing, organic certification and leaf grade, so that is what the tea aisle is judged on. Add sugar or milk and none of these numbers hold.

Per-100 g values are transcribed from the FSSAI nutrition panel printed on the pack, or from the brand's own product page where the pack photograph was unreadable. They are not modelled or estimated from a generic food database. Brands reformulate. If the pack in your hand disagrees with this site, the pack is right — tell us and we will fix it.

3. How the Nutri-Score is computed

Not copied from anywhere. Every grade on this site is computed from the nutrition table above it, using the published 2017 Nutri-Score algorithm — the original Santé publique France specification, which is fully documented and therefore checkable by hand. Every product page shows the complete points breakdown so you can verify the arithmetic yourself.

Three scoring tracks exist and picking the wrong one is the usual source of error:

Added fats (ghee, cooking oil, butter) score saturated fat as a share of total fat. Without this every cooking oil would be an E and the grade would carry no information.
Beverages use a harsher scale on which only water can reach an A.
Everything else, milk and nut butters included, uses the general-foods track.

Two honest caveats. First, Nutri-Score is not used in India — FSSAI has its own front-of-pack rules. We compute it anyway because it gives one comparable number across an aisle. Second, a grade is only comparable within the algorithm version that produced it: the 2023 revision moves several categories, so a grade here may differ from one printed on a European pack. Grades are also a nutrient score, not a verdict on a food — 90% dark chocolate scores D and is still a better buy than a 45% bar that scores C.

4. Where the prices come from

Blinkit prices are real. They are read from the price published on each product's own Blinkit page. 46 of 106 products returned a live price; the remaining 60 were not stocked in the store Blinkit served us, and are shown with an est. marker and an explicit warning on the product page.

Zepto and Instamart prices are a documented estimate, not a live feed. Each is derived from the observed Blinkit price by a fixed per-platform multiplier plus a deterministic per-product variation, so the same product always shows the same number. Stock on those platforms is modelled the same way, with direct-to-consumer and regional brands modelled as less widely listed. The full model is about forty lines in scripts/build_catalog.py — read it before you trust a number.

Why model it at all? Because the comparison engine is the point of this site, and it should be working, inspectable software rather than a screenshot. It is written so that swapping in a real price feed changes one function and nothing else.

5. How the basket comparison works

The basket page prices your list on all three platforms and shows them side by side. It does not pick a winner. For each platform it sums the items that platform stocks, then adds that platform's delivery fee unless the subtotal cleared that platform's own free-delivery threshold.

An item a platform does not stock is shown as not listed rather than quietly dropped — that matters, because a total built from a smaller basket looks cheaper while buying you less. Each platform card also says plainly whether it stocks your whole basket.

We deliberately stopped short of recommending one. Assortments and prices move daily, our non-Blinkit prices are modelled rather than live (see above), and you already know which app you have installed and which has your address saved. Ranking on numbers that soft would be false precision.

6. What we cannot do

None of Blinkit, Zepto or Swiggy Instamart publishes a public add-to-cart API or deep link. No third-party website can fill your cart on those apps, and any site claiming to is either guessing or lying. What this site does instead is give you a direct link to each item on each platform — the exact product page where we have one, a pre-filled search where we do not — and copy your list to the clipboard.

7. Money

No affiliate links, no sponsored placements, no brand paid to appear. Platform links are plain links. If that changes, it will be disclosed here first and on every affected product page.

Found an error? The catalogue, the scoring code and this page are all in the public repository. Open an issue with a photo of the pack and it gets fixed.