Archives for October 2015

A month ago, I made a master grocery list, and here’s how it’s working out so far:

I’m liking using the master list, though it has taken awhile to make sure that everything I buy is on it.  When I first made it, I didn’t have chicken on my meat list at all!  (We do eat chicken, though we eat a lot more pork, beef, and sausage.)

At first, I wasn’t going to put things like yeast on it, because I buy it only a couple of times a year.  However, I realized that I’d rather have it on the list and be able to put a check mark beside it rather than have to write it in, so there’s no nothing I’ve left off the list (intentionally).

Originally, my thought was that I’d use the list to go through my cabinets and see what I needed, though so far I’ve used it more to just check things off throughout the week, as I realize we need them.  Right now, my food storage cabinets are really deep and hard to look into, so it’s not a lot of fun to inventory it every week and therefore, I haven’t really been doing it.  I do think a weekly inventory using the master list is probably going to be the most effective, so I’m going to try to get into the habit of doing it.

I have it divided into categories that somewhat correspond to sections of the store or particular aisles, and I find that to be pretty helpful as I’m shopping.  I’ve always tried to loosely organize my grocery list by category, but of course I always end up adding a few things after I’ve made the list and then I can’t fit them into the right category, which means I end up walking all over the store a few times because my list isn’t completely ordered by department.

One of the things that I haven’t decided how to handle is how to indicate which store I want to buy it at.  To save time, I’ve been taking my master list to the grocery store with me, instead of rewriting it and separating it by store.  So, I’ve been putting an “S” next to the items I want to buy at Sam’s, and a “K” next to the items I want to buy at King Soopers.  (I also shop at Sprouts, but not every week.) There are benefits to that (if I forget to buy something at one store, or they were out of the item, my memory is jogged when I see it on the list), but it can also be confusing.

While I thought I could make a complete list, except for maybe produce, I decided it was helpful to have some blank spaces in each category because there are random things that I’ll want to buy and I want to keep it all in the same place, so I added blank lines in each category after the first couple of weeks.

So, that’s my update on how it’s working.  The master grocery list is a good fit for me right now, since I really don’t like planning a menu and creating a list but I really enjoy cooking, so keeping a well-stocked pantry means that I can usually think of something I want to make and make it.  (I still have to plan ahead a bit on meat and produce, of course.)

If you want to download my list as a guide to making your own, you can click here to download a PDF, iWork Pages file, or Microsoft Word file.  It was originally created in iWork Pages, and the formatting in Word will probably not be correct.