Cultivating the grocery list
For many of us, getting groceries is a routine of life. So it would make sense to have a way of going about it that’s reliably efficient. Keeping a grocery list can be as simple as jotting items down on a piece of paper right before heading out to the store, or more involved like meticulously maintaining spreadsheets or using a dedicated list-making app (I only recently found out about AnyList). In this post, I’m sharing our current system and what I like about it.
The tool my household uses for our grocery lists is Trello, and to be honest, we kind of fell into it. Trello, which I originally got an account for because of work, is basically a board of “cards” that you can arrange into different columns. Each card can be opened to show a description and one or more checklists.
On a shared Trello board, we have a “Groceries” column with a card for each store (or type of store) we go to regularly. Each card contains a checklist of items we typically get there.
Why I like this system:
Trello has an app so we can access the checklists across devices in organic, useful ways — for example, adding items to lists on the iPad in the kitchen or pulling up the lists on my phone when in store.
We can keep a somewhat unchanged list of regularly needed items for each card and use the “hide checked items” feature to see only what we need on that particular shopping trip. To clarify: before each grocery trip, we’ll review and uncheck only the items we need at that time and then click “hide checked items” to easily see the specific list for that outing. Importantly, this also avoids having to keep adding the same things each time. (The next level to this game is ordering the items according to the general layout/flow of the store 😛).
The checklist workflow: uncheck items needed ➡️ click “hide checked items” to display an updated list for the upcoming grocery trip.
You can create multiple checklists in each card. In the last half year, I’ve tried to organize our lists a bit more by keeping separate checklists in each card: one for “Staples” and one for “Special” (items we only need for this time for some reason and won’t be restocking regularly). For Costco, I also separated items into “Grocery Staples” and “Household Staples”. If we’re making a somewhat elaborate recipe, I might make an ad hoc checklist for those recipe ingredients (see example above). I find this has helped keep the “Staples” list cleaner and generally make it easier to see what’s what and encourage regular pruning of all checklists.
An ad hoc checklist for ingredients to make a specific, somewhat elaborate recipe. (P.S. This is the pasta salad — would recommend!)
What’s your grocery list system? Are there other tools I should be aware of?