Unfortunately, while there are seeds of greatness in Grocery Pal, what actually grows at this point is nothing but weeds--and I'm allergic to weeds.

When you first launch the app, you enter your zip code; Grocery Pal then provides a list of local supermarkets. So far, so good. I added a couple of stores and was able to browse their promotions by category, which worked fairly well. If you're interested in building your shopping list based on what's on sale, the app works pretty decently: You can browse the discounted foods, see details about the food (and the savings), and of course add them to your shopping list.

But when it's time to assemble your shopping list from scratch, Grocery Pal gets a little less friendly. I tap in the first item--"chocolate milk"--and then tap to save. But if I want to know about promotions available for the newly-added item, I must tap into it again in my grocery list, and then tap on "Price Comparison by Stores." Of course, doing so for chocolate milk only brought up a list of various permutations of -chocolate milk, since Grocery Pal can only show you pricing information for foods that are currently discounted in your grocers' circulars.

For "chocolate milk," the app found unhelpful results, but with many foods it will find nothing at all. What's worse, though, is that Grocery Pal sometimes doesn't find foods that are actually available at one or more of your area stores, at a discounted price. That's because of poor labeling--which I suspect isn't entirely the app's fault: My search for "Multigrain Cheerios" came up empty, but when I browsed cereals, I found "General Mills Cereal." That item's detail indicated the promotional rate applied to regular, Honey Nut, and Multigrain Cheerios, as well as Fiber One. But since Grocery Pal searches only on the title field, it didn't find that useful entry.

Browsing within the app can present similar challenges. At first, I didn't find that "General Mills Cereal" entry, since I was browsing under "Breakfast & Cereal." When I did find it, it was separately classified under the far more generic (and far less useful) label "Grocery."