The perfect grocery list-making app doesn’t exist

There is no activity more chaotic than voluntarily walking into a grocery store without a list.

I know. Some people thrive on vibration-based running. They can offer meals on the fly, buy what’s on sale and work around it, or follow some weird “3-3-2-2-1” rule or whatever I always see on Instagram. I’m not one of those people.

But even though I know that a list is essential to my survival at the store, I have never been able to develop a reliable system for meal planning and creating grocery lists. Every week I write a list by hand and every week I forget something crucial. So I asked myself, as I so often do when faced with a problem: “Is there an app that can solve this problem for me?” » It turns out that there is no Single app, which seems to be the case every time I think productivity software or a paper planner is going to change everything for me. But on my journey to find the perfect, elusive solution, I found some really great tools.

I learned a lot about my colleagues when I asked them about their grocery list-making strategies. There is the iOS user who swears by Samsung Power Supplyof all things! Then there are the pen and paper sufferers. And at least two people use Google Keep, which is two more people than I thought. Coordinating with other household members emerged as a recurring challenge, and a theme became clear: Some people are list people, others are staunchly not list people, and these two types of people are often in partnership. And based on my own lived experience? Yeah, that checks out.

My husband would rather pick his way through a pit full of live snakes than sit down and write a grocery list. Or at least he’d rather clean the house from top to bottom than plan a week’s worth of dinners. After years of struggling, we finally accepted this dynamic, and that’s exactly what he does: clean the house while I plan meals and go to the store. As an added level of difficulty, these days I’m usually carrying a 4 year old in the shopping cart with his own ideas about what we should buy.

Maybe that’s why I kept ruining grocery shopping. I would forget a critical item, and then someone would have to make a whole other trip to the store, and I hate that. Additionally, my list set is lacking; trying to write down the ingredients I would need while still placing them on a single sheet of paper in the correct order meant that I inevitably put too many items in one section and turned it into a barely readable mess. I did what any rational person would do: ordered a fancy paper planner and downloaded lots of apps.

I tried an app called A Better Meal, although it’s more of a health-focused recipe discovery tool. It also has a subscription, which I wanted to avoid at all costs. But by trying a free trial, I got a taste of the convenience this type of app can offer. There are others that do something similar, but A Better Meal provides a library of recipes and can put together a weekly meal plan for you based on that alone. I prefer to find recipes on my own, and to that end I was impressed by the app’s recipe-making tools.

A Better Meal also lets you take a photo of a recipe in a book or import one from a website; the app will clean it, distill it into a list of ingredients, and give you a clear set of instructions. You can add everything you need for a recipe to your grocery list, and there’s a nice cooking mode that displays each step in large font with the relevant ingredients next to it, so you don’t have to go back to the list when you can’t remember whether it’s a tablespoon or a teaspoon of cayenne. This distinction is important; ask me how I know. I ruled out A Better Meal, however, because I’m too cheap for another subscription, and I don’t really need the recipe discovery feature that it relies on. That’s when Papier’s package arrived.

The edge Vee Song, senior wearable reviewer and resident stationery manager, had pointed me to Papier’s meal planning notebook. It’s simple: one sheet for each week with a large grid to plan each day’s meals and a shopping list at the bottom side that you can tear off and take to the store. And like so many planners I’ve purchased over the years, it’s more beautiful than practical.

I ran out of space about halfway through my grocery list, while leaving a lot of empty space on the other side of the page because I don’t need to plan and write. seven individual breakfasts every week. Who the hell does this? I’m going to buy a sleeve of bagels and a tub of Philadelphia cream cheese and I’m going to go through them like a normal person, thanks. I put aside the Paper planner and turned to another technological solution.

Paprika is a simple app for storing recipes and making lists, and The edge Senior political editor Adi Robertson swears by it. You add recipes that you can label and categorize. From there, you can tap to add all the ingredients to a grocery list and leave out the things you already have at home. Paprika does a decent job of organizing items into the right sections, like identifying “yogurt packets” as dairy and filing granola bars under the cereal aisle. You can also recategorize items manually if that puts something in the wrong place. These are things other apps do, but Paprika has one awesome feature I haven’t found elsewhere: flexibility.

The app is available on iOS and Android, which is an important consideration when constantly switching between the two platforms. There’s no subscription, just a reasonable one-time fee ($4.99, and the Android version is free for up to 50 recipes). And when I realized I could add all of our usual weekly groceries as ingredients to a “recipe” and add them to the list with just a few clicks? That’s when it started to click for me.

I began to realize that my struggle – making the grocery list – was actually a bunch of small, linked struggles all bundled together. Collecting and saving recipes, planning the week, memorizing all the weirdly specific things my husband prefers (like “bulk carrots”), adding ingredients to a list, putting that list on something I can quickly reference at the store. Perhaps my quest for a single solution was doomed from the start. I decided to divide and conquer.

Here’s what I landed on: plan the week with the Fancy Paper Planner, where I use the extra space offered for lunch and dinner planning to jot down what’s happening. Can I accomplish the same thing with a regular old notebook? Yes, but also, sometimes it’s nice to use a good thing – an underappreciated fact when we’re looking for the perfect productivity tool to do it all. Making the activity feel a little less like a chore goes a long way.

Once I’m done planning, I add the recipes I use to Paprika, and from there, the ingredients appear on the grocery list in the app. I saved a recipe called “The Regulars” with things like milk and bread so I could add those to the list as well. Then there’s the final tool, something I’d forgotten about all this time: a smartwatch.

This last item might actually be the most critical change in my grocery shopping routine. Taking my phone out to the store over and over again to check things off my list seems like too much friction. But I also hate crossing items off a paper list in the middle of an aisle. Related: Can anyone understand why there is nowhere to stand in a grocery store that won’t be in the way of someone else? Scientists should study this phenomenon and, while they’re at it, figure out why Trader Joe’s parking lots are so messy. But checking my list on a smartwatch and seeing the items I’ve already selected? So much easier. When I tried this weekend, everything on the list ended up in the cart and I flew through QFC at unprecedented speed.

My new grocery list routine isn’t perfect, but it’s already working much better than what I was doing before. There’s also a slight problem when I’m on Android: Paprika has an iOS app but nothing for Wear OS, so I copied my shopping list into a Google Keep note before heading to the store. I guess this will make me the third person voluntarily using Google Keep.