Food Shopping Made Eas(ier)

Food shopping – some people love it, but most people hate it! In case you couldn’t guess by my menu planning posts, I actually enjoy it. I have come up with a few tricks to make it easier that I’d like to share.

The one step that made a huge difference in my food shopping experience (besides planning menus before I got to the store) is making a master shopping list. Mine is shown below, but yours will probably be different (unless you go to the same supermarket as me and eat the exact same foods we do). The first key is that the list is organized in the same order as the aisles of my supermarket. I know some people write or re-write their list in that order, and I was one of them for years, but this eliminates most guesswork, trying to squeeze items in, or drawing arrows on your shopping list.

If you have space to keep a copy of it posted somewhere, you can just check off what you need as you run out. Mine is inside the kitchen island with the coupons, so I have the extra step of jotting down what I’m low on or out of on a magnetic notepad on my fridge, but if you have a “kitchen command center” where you can tack a copy up (I’ll be setting one of those up soon and sharing with all of you), it makes life even easier. If not, a magnetic notepad on the refrigerator or a pad posted inside a cabinet door will give you a place to write things down as soon as you notice you need them.

It will take you a little time to think of the things you buy most and to figure out where they are in the store – if you ask at the courtesy desk at your store, they may have a list, and if that doesn’t work for whatever reason (you don’t feel like battling the lines at the courtesy desk or they don’t have a list), you can always take pictures of the signs at the end of each aisle. Once you have your store layout in hand, you can start your list. When you’re making up a master list, only include foods you buy often, with room for extras at the end of each category. For instance, the first page includes the produce aisle. We often buy strawberries, but we rarely buy pears, so I included strawberries but not pears. On the off chance I want a pear, I can write it in the “produce” area. It does you no good to have pickles on your list if you never buy them!

Besides the extra lines, I made this nice and big so I can write down a brand or quantity if I’m using coupons or if there’s anything else I need to remember (for instance, if I know I want cherry tomatoes, I can write that down next to “Tomato”).

I prepared this list as a table in Microsoft Word and keep it on my computer. I print four at a time, one for each week, and at the end of each month, I have a calendar reminder to print it out. Obviously, if you shop on a different schedule, you may need a different number per month, but the idea is to have it handy when you want it – the minute you realize you’re running out of something is not when you want to go print out a four-page list. I usually start my menu planning on it – I write what we’re planning for each dinner at the top so I can check off what I need to buy to make dinner for the week.

I know this seems like a lot of work, but the time you save in the store and the money you save not having to run out to the convenience store and spend three times as much for sugar because you forgot to buy it when you went shopping (can we tell this may or may not have happened to me) really pays off. It’s a one-time investment that pays big dividends!

Hope this has inspired you to set up a master shopping list! If you have other ideas to make food shopping quicker and easier, please share!