The perfect grocery list-making app doesn’t exist

There is no more chaotic activity than willfully entering a grocery store without a list.

I know. Some people thrive on vibes-based grocery shopping. They can come up with meals on the fly, buy what’s on sale and work around that, or follow some bizarre “3-3-2-2-1” rule or whatever I’m always seeing on Instagram. I am not one of these people.

But while I know a list is essential for my survival at the store, I’ve never been able to work out a reliable meal planning and grocery list-making system. Every week I write out a list by hand, and every week I forget something crucial. So I asked myself, as I so often do when confronted with a problem, “Is there an app that can just fix this for me?” As it turns out, there isn’t a single app, which seems to be the case whenever I think one piece of productivity software or one paper planner is going to change everything for me. But on my journey to find the elusive perfect solution, I did pick up some pretty good tools.

I learned a lot about my coworkers when I asked them for their grocery list-making strategies. There’s the iOS user who swears by Samsung Food, of all things! Then there are the pen-and-paper sickos. And at least two people use Google Keep, which is two more people than I thought used Google Keep. Coordinating with other members of the household came up as a recurring challenge, and a theme became clear: Some people are list people, some people are decidedly not list people, and those two kinds of people are often partnered. And based on my own lived experience? Yeah, that checks out.

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

Perhaps as a result, I kept messing up the grocery runs. I’d forget a critical item, and then someone would have to make a whole other trip to the store, and I hate that. Plus, my list game is lacking; trying to write out the ingredients I’ll need while also fitting them onto a single sheet of paper in the correct order meant I was inevitably smooshing too many items into a section and turning it into a barely legible mess. I did what any rational person would do: order a fancy paper planner and download a bunch of apps.

I gave an app called A Better Meal a shot, despite it looking more like a health-focused recipe-discovery tool. It also has a subscription, which I wanted to avoid at all costs. But taking it for a spin on a free trial, I got a glimpse of the convenience this kind of app can offer. There are others that do something similar, but A Better Meal provides a library of recipes and can make a weekly meal plan for you based on this alone. I’d rather find recipes on my own, and to that end I was impressed with the app’s recipe intake tools.

A Better Meal also lets you take a picture of a recipe in a book or import one from a website; the app will clean it up and distill it into an ingredient list and give you a set of clear directions. You can add everything you’ll need for a recipe to your grocery list, and there’s a nice cook-along mode that shows each step in big type with the relevant ingredients alongside it, so you don’t have to flip back to the list when you can’t remember if it’s a tablespoon or teaspoon of cayenne. That distinction is important; ask me how I know. I ruled out A Better Meal, though, on account of me being too cheap for another subscription, and I don’t really need the recipe discovery feature it leans into. That’s when the package from Papier arrived.

The Verge senior wearable reviewer and resident stationery head Vee Song had pointed me toward Papier’s meal planning notebook. It’s simple: a sheet for each week with a big grid for planning each day’s meals and a grocery list down the 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 it is practical.

I ran out of space about halfway through my grocery list, meanwhile leaving a lot of blank space on the other side of the page because I don’t need to plan out and write down seven individual breakfasts every single week. Who on Earth does this? I’ll buy a sleeve of bagels and a tub of Philadelphia cream cheese and just work my way through them like a normal person, thank you. I set aside the Papier planner and turned to another tech solution.

Paprika is a no-frills app for storing recipes and making lists, and The Verge senior policy editor Adi Robertson swears by it. You add recipes, which you can tag and categorize. From there, you can tap to add all the ingredients to a grocery list, and you can leave off things you already have at home. Paprika does a decent job of organizing items into the right sections, like identifying “yogurt pouches” as dairy items and filing granola bars under the cereal aisle. You can also recategorize things manually if it puts something in the wrong place. Those are things that other apps do, but Paprika has a killer feature I haven’t found elsewhere: flexibility.

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

I started realizing that my struggle — making the grocery list — was actually a bunch of little related struggles all bundled up together. Collecting and saving recipes, planning the week, remembering all the weirdly specific stuff my husband prefers (like “loose carrots”), adding ingredients to a list, getting that list onto something I can reference quickly at the store. Maybe my quest for a single solution was doomed from the start. I decided to divide and conquer.

Here’s what I’ve landed on: planning out the week with the fancy Papier planner, where I use the extra space afforded for lunch and dinner planning to note stuff that’s going on. Could I accomplish the same thing with a regular old notebook? Yeah, but also, sometimes it’s nice to use a nice thing — an underappreciated fact when we’re searching for that perfect, do-everything productivity tool. Making the activity feel a little bit less like a chore goes a long way.

Once the planning is done, I add the recipes I’m using to Paprika, and from there the ingredients go on the grocery list inside the app. I saved a recipe called “The Regulars” with things like milk and bread so I can add them to the list, too. Then there’s the final tool, something I forgot I had at my disposal this whole time: a smartwatch.

That last bit might actually be the most critical change to my grocery routine. Taking my phone out at the store over and over to check things off my list feels like too much friction. But I also hate crossing things off a paper list in the middle of an aisle. Related: Can someone look into why there is nowhere to stand in a grocery store that is not 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 such a mess. But checking my list on a smartwatch and tapping away the things I’ve already picked up? So much easier. When I gave this a try over the weekend, everything on the list made it into the cart, and I flew through QFC with unprecedented speed.

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