Just like the memes say, you don’t need AI to write your shopping list. In fact, you don’t need a list at all. The best way to shop for groceries in the 21st century is with a spreadsheet; it’s as customizable, interactive and as shareable as you want it to be.
Why I Started Using a Grocery Spreadsheet, and You Should Too
Grocery spreadsheets are easy to make, they’re practical, and they can help reduce spending and food waste. Households can collaborate for meal planning and purchasing schedules, and neighbors can even participate to share prices for common items — milk, eggs, a loaf of bread — at nearby shops, if you have multiple retailers in the area. There are plenty of free templates already available to build your own grocery shopping spreadsheet. And yes, color-coding is an option.
Carlen Zhu, a 30-year-old product designer in New York City has been using a hybrid grocery list and meal-planning sheet since August 2021. She organizes the sheet by days of the week, and then splits rows by meal and the person eating them (her husband sometimes eats different meals). The sheet is then separated into three categories: “Perishable food to use,” “food to buy,” and “check for.”
You can also share itemized data or totals from grocery receipts to stay on budget. Or use the spreadsheet as a way to track prices week over week for frequently purchased items.
I’ve noticed that some of my staple fridge items, like Greek yogurt and pre-bottled iced coffee are cheapest at the supermarket two blocks west of me. Produce is fresher and better priced at the shop two blocks to the north, so I can organize my spreadsheet by necessity and where and when I want to shop at the best price. To further clarify, there are a few grocery and household items I get delivered weekly that I have in a separate list.
I also keep track of my groceries on a color-coded list listing produce, dairy/eggs, meat, and pantry items, changing the color when I need to restock, for quick reference if I happen to pop into a store for something else. My wife has access to the sheet, so we can also alert each other to what’s in stock.
I then have two columns of recipes: one is go-tos (sausage and beans, curry, grain bowl), and the other is meals I’m developing or recipes I’ve saved from publications that I want to try out. Like Zhu, knowing what I have to use and what supplemental ingredients I need to buy keeps me well stocked and efficiently cycling through what I have already purchased.
Lists are fun, but multicolored, multiple-column spreadsheets are far better.
Do you have a smart tip for making a grocery list? Tell us about it in the comments below.
