I highly doubt that you need to send the JSON in the format you described because that format is not valid JSON.

I suggest you reconsider my approach and let DBI process the data into a format that can be directly handed to any kind of JSON processor and will produce the appropriate JSON output.

Update:

Note that your proposed format does not use double quotes for the entries product and price, and that your proposed format uses square brackets []. The documentation at http://easyautocomplete.com/guide does always use quoted entries and uses objects within {}.