Show HN: MCP Server for a UK Meat Price Comparison Site
A UK meat price comparison site that scrapes data from multiple online butchers has added an MCP server, allowing users to query price history, basket comparisons, and deals via AI tools like Claude and ChatGPT instead of using the website's UI. The service is read-only, free, and requires an email registration for an API key.
Background
- This is a Show HN (Hacker News) post by an independent developer who built a meat price comparison site for the UK market. It scrapes prices from multiple online butchers, maps products to a shared taxonomy, and tracks historical pricing over a year.
- MCP (Model Context Protocol) is an emerging open standard that lets AI assistants (Claude, ChatGPT, etc.) connect directly to external data sources via APIs — in this case, querying the meat pricing database in real time rather than clicking through a website.
- The project grew out of the author's personal hobby (smoking meat on a Kamado grill, a type of ceramic barbecue) and evolved into a full basket-comparison tool with price trends, competitive analysis, and an MCP server for AI-driven queries.
- OAuth refers to an authentication protocol for API access; the author notes it was tricky to implement for MCP, which is a relatively new protocol with limited tooling.