Canada

The issue with this sort of thing is primarily one of data entry, rather than "tech savvy" as such. Defining the database is easy compared to getting the data in there.

Quick options would include parsing the information out of the stores' websites (possible, but if Javascript is involved you may be looking at puppeting a browser with Selenium, which isn't fast and can get tedious, and the approach depends on the websites being complete, accurate, and up-to-date), or hacking or snooping on the stores' own mobile apps (if they have them) to get price information in a usable format. Approaches like this are inherantly brittle, as even trivial changes made from the grocery chains' end can cause them to break. Scraping information without a defined API or the cooperation of the owner of the data is a moving target. From experience, I can tell you that it gets annoying fast.

In the case of the Austrian government, they probably wanted that cooperation and defined API. Which would have required careful negotiations with each company and paid programmers looking at the corporate databases. That would have increased their cost and lengthened their projected timeframe. Corruption and corporate greed did the rest.