Will Web tool catch on at the grocery store?

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: Shoppers who dread selecting a salad dressing or anguish over buying the wrong jar of pickles can finally stop tormenting themselves. Zeer.com, a new Cambridge, Massachusetts website, brings the wisdom of the crowd to the grocery store—providing user-generated reviews to spare people the agony of uncertainty in the aisle.

The website is part food search engine, part community website. Users can look up food by name or by specifying criteria such as gluten-free or calorie count. They can also read about and review products, create shopping lists, make profiles, and join communities of like-minded eaters. Zeer is expected to say the service will also be available on cellphones, through a mobile browser. “If you could ask a product a question, what would it be?” said Michael Putnam, president and founder of Zeer. “What do my friends think of you? Are you healthy?”

But will it work? Zeer demystifies an arena of life that hardly seems to need such help. It brings social Web tools to the kind of store people visit frequently, where products have a fairly straightforward function—to be eaten.

“Milk is a baseline commodity. People are so familiar with the product and how they use it that unless there’s something dramatically new about it, they don’t need extra help,” said Patti Freeman Evans, a research director at JupiterResearch, who did say the website could be useful to people with special dietary interests.

The mobile version allows people to use a cellphone’s browser to access information at m.zeer.com. Shoppers can read reviews by typing in a product’s name or product code into a search field. A user who created a shopping list online can leave the paper list at home and pull up the electronic version.

One challenge will be attracting traffic to the website, which plans to make money through advertising. That could be tough for the small start-up, since people seeking product information overwhelmingly use Google or go directly to a retailer’s website, according to Freeman Evans.

If Zeer does attract a critical mass of users, the site’s strongest feature could be its social features, which allow users to not only browse and rate products, but connect with others with the same food allergy or low-cholesterol needs. “If it’s a new mother who is trying to figure out what are the best sort of pediatric nutrition supplements, what products work best for colicky babies—that could really help,” Freeman Evans said.