A shopping list is an important item for your weekly or fortnightly shopping trip. Whether you prefer the pen and paper method for making your shopping list, or the functionality of using an app on your phone instead, they are both helpful for managing your lists.
Most households will have staple items that they buy on a regular basis with a few others to supplement the weekly shop. The difficulty begins when you forget to buy a staple item that every family member uses or a crucial ingredient needed for the success of a family dinner. Shopping lists help to prevent mini disasters like these and are well worth the ten minutes or so spent organising one before you hit the shops.
Using an app on your phone is a very practical way to manage your shopping list. Quite often you will be shopping for the same items on a regular basis. By storing them in your app you are saving yourself the trouble of writing them out over and over again.
Some apps will now let you simply dictate your list into your phone by saying it aloud. They also have the technology so that you can use a barcode scanner to scan the foods you have in your fridge so you can add them to your list
The other useful feature is that they can usually sort items in list by the order of the aisle they are in at your local supermarket. All you have to do is to create the aisles in your app.
These are a couple of popular shopping list apps that are both free can be easily downloaded to your phone.
Scan2List is an app designed specifically for Australian shoppers. They cite their benefits as: “Scan2List is a free Australian iPhone App that allows you to quickly and easily create shopping lists simply by scanning the barcodes of items in your pantry or manually adding them to a list. Lists can then be saved for future use and be synchronised with other Scan2List App users in the household. When at the shops, a list can be organised into aisles that match the layout of the store and items can be checked off as they are added to the trolley.”
Some of the benefits of using Scan2List include:
You can download it for free on iTunes.
Another popular app is Grocery IQ which is also helpful in planning and managing your shopping list:
Its many practical features include:
You can download Grocery IQ on iTunes
Irrespective of the method you choose, the shopping list is a valuable tool in saving you time when doing the weekly or fortnightly shop. It also prevents you from buying unnecessary items and will aid in successful meal times as well.