Dairy 
Grains 
Fruit 
Meat 
Snacks 
Drinks Have you ever wondered how your shopping would turn out if you were better prepared? It’ll probably have fewer missing items and not as many unnecessary additions. But that’s what master grocery list is for. It will give you better control over your grocery shopping, helping you spend less and save more. But is there anything super special or secret about a master grocery list? Not really. It’s nothing more than a premade grocery list in which products are arranged by category. You can make one yourself, or use our free printable template.
What are the categories for?
Shopping gets much easier when you know the shop. You know directly where to go and in what order pick up products. To help you do this, you should have all the products on your grocery list grouped in thematic order. By doing this, you won’t find yourself running around the shop because your items are in an unsorted jumble.
If you’re a bit worried about how to categorize your list, don’t worry. It is simply arranging your shopping items into the supermarket aisles you would expect to find them in. Bagels will be under “bakery”, chickpeas will be found in the “canned food” aisles, and ice cream in the “freezer” section. Yes, it’s as straightforward as that! It’s worth trying because using categories will make your time at the grocery store much more effective. If you know where to go, and everything in each category can be picked up at once, you’ll get things done faster and you will be able to get home quicker.
How does a master grocery list template affect meal planning?
Some people like having everything under control. Feeling in control is a lovely little side effect of being prepared. Making and using a master grocery list is part of that preparedness. Did you know that being prepared can even have positive benefits for your brain and mental health? As if you needed any more reasons to make that master grocery list!
Being prepared and in control is important, especially for people on specific diets. Here, there’s no place for improvisation. Every meal must be planned meticulously. If not, you just won’t have the products necessary to prepare you super specific meal.
Even if you’re not on a specific diet, you can use a master grocery list to help you stay healthy. Try this healthy grocery list.
How do you make one?
Sit down for a little bit and think. What do you really need? Then start to write out all these items. If you find your list a bit too long and unwieldy, here are some decluttering tips you might find useful.
Next, think about how you’re going to make and keep this master grocery list. If you are a tech-savvy person, consider using a grocery list app. Some of the apps available let you dictate entire lists. Other available functions include the ability to share your lists with your family and friends, choose items from extensive grocery databases, or even offer useful culinary tips, information about special offers in supermarkets, and tasty recipes.
Using pen and paper to create your master grocery lists is just as good, especially if you use these great tips about how to make a written list even more effective.
If you are struggling for ideas about what to put onto your list and how to format it, you can use our free premade master grocery list template below.
Your premade master grocery list template
The 10 essentials on this list
The products on this list that have a page of their own. Open any of them for its calories, its protein and how to keep it.
How to run it as a weekly pass
A master grocery list gets used backwards from an ordinary one. You don’t write it before the shop, you walk round your kitchen with it and mark what’s missing.
Do that in the same order every week and it takes minutes. Fridge first, because that’s where Milk, Butter, Cheese, Cottage cheese and Yogurt live, and that’s where the gaps bite soonest. Then the freezer. Then the cupboard, where Pasta, Rice, Cereal and the whole Seasoning category sit quietly for months and run out without ever announcing it.
Finish in the bathroom and the hallway. Personal Care and Pets are on this template precisely because they’re the categories nobody remembers while standing in a kitchen. Toilet tissue, Tissues, Soap, Shampoo, Feed and Litter are never urgent until the moment they are, and they’re the reason people drive back out on a Sunday evening.
Mark, don’t tick. A master list works when the marks mean “we’re low on this”, so the rows you pass over tell you as much as the ones you circle. By the time you reach the shop the categories do the rest: everything marked under Fruit comes off one set of shelves, everything under Dairy off another, and you cross the shop once instead of three times.
Keep it a checklist, not a wish list
The quiet danger with a premade list is that it’s printed, and anything printed looks like it is asking to be filled in.
Most weeks, most of this template should stay blank. There are twenty kinds of Fruit on it and you are not buying twenty kinds of Fruit. The categories exist so whatever you do need has an obvious place to be marked, not so that each one goes home with something. The moment you add Grapefruit because the row was sitting there, the list has started spending your money for you.
Treat the long categories as menus instead. Fruit, Vegetables and Meat are there to remind you that nothing green has gone in the trolley this week, or that Fish hasn’t appeared in a fortnight. One from the column is usually the right answer, not six.
Prune it every so often. After a few months you’ll spot rows that have never once been marked, and products you buy constantly that somehow aren’t on there at all. Cross out the first, write in the second, and print it again. A master list that matches what your household actually eats ends up shorter than the one you started with, and the shorter it gets, the quicker the weekly pass goes.
