Why your grocery list should be sorted the way you walk the shop
A grocery list sorted by aisle saves you walking the shop more than once. The order that works is the order most supermarkets are laid out in - produce, bakery, dairy, meat and fish, pantry, spices, frozen - and the important feature is not the default order but whether the app remembers when you move something.
A shopping list in recipe order is a list that makes you walk the shop three times.
Recipe one wants tomatoes, pasta and parmesan. Recipe two wants chicken, rice and coriander. Follow that list top to bottom and you cross the whole shop, come back for the cheese, and go out again for the herbs you walked past four minutes ago.
Sorting by aisle fixes it, and it is one of those features that sounds trivial and changes the whole experience of using an app.
The order that actually works
Supermarkets differ, but not as much as you would think. Most large ones are laid out on roughly the same logic — fresh around the outside, dry goods through the middle, frozen near the end because you want it in the trolley last.
A sensible default:
| Order | Section | Typically |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Produce | Fruit, vegetables, fresh herbs, salad |
| 2 | Bakery | Bread, rolls, tortillas, pastry |
| 3 | Dairy and chilled | Milk, butter, cheese, yoghurt, eggs |
| 4 | Meat and fish | Fresh and cured |
| 5 | Pantry | Tins, pasta, rice, oils, condiments |
| 6 | Spices and baking | Dried herbs, spices, flour, sugar |
| 7 | Frozen | Peas, pastry, fish fingers |
| 8 | Everything else | Household, drinks, the odd one out |
Two details in that ordering do real work. Produce is first because it is usually at the entrance and because it is what bruises — you want it at the top of the trolley, not under the tins. Frozen is last because everything in it starts defrosting the moment it goes in.
The categorisations every app gets wrong
Ingredients do not sort themselves cleanly, and a handful cause almost all the complaints:
- Fresh herbs versus dried. "Basil" is produce. "Basil" is also spices. They
are different products, on different shelves, in different parts of the shop — and an app that treats them as one word sends you to the wrong end twice.
- Eggs. Chilled in some countries, an ambient shelf in others.
- Tortillas and flatbreads. Bakery, chilled, or the "world foods" aisle,
depending entirely on the shop.
- Nuts. Baking aisle, snack aisle, or produce.
- Butter and cheese in a big shop. Sometimes a dedicated counter well away
from the milk.
- Coconut milk. World foods, baking, or with the tinned goods.
You cannot solve this with a better default list. There is no correct answer, because the answer is different in different shops — and your shop is the only one that matters to you.
The feature that actually matters
So the important question about aisle sorting is not "is the default order right?". It is:
When I move something to the right aisle, does it stay moved?
This is the single most complained-about thing in reviews of grocery apps. Somebody drags coconut milk from "pantry" to "world foods" every single week, for a year, because the app has a fixed category table and no memory.
In FasterChef, moving an item to a different aisle is remembered for that ingredient, permanently, for you. Swipe it once and it is filed in your aisle from then on, in every future list. Your corrections accumulate into a map of your actual supermarket rather than evaporating each week.
It is a cheap feature to build and it earns disproportionate loyalty, because it is the point at which the app stops being generic and starts being yours.
Sorting is downstream of merging
Aisle order only helps if the list is correct in the first place, and this is where most lists fall over before they get anywhere near a category.
If "2 cloves garlic" and "1 tbsp minced garlic" are two separate rows, sorting by aisle just puts them next to each other — a neatly organised mistake. You still have to notice, work out that they are the same thing, and mentally add them while standing in produce.
So the order of operations has to be: normalise the ingredient, merge the duplicates, convert the units, then sort by aisle. Get that sequence wrong and the aisles are decoration.
We wrote about the merging half of this in detail — why it is genuinely hard, and what it takes to get right. The short version is a dictionary of 412 canonical ingredients with 1,370 written aliases, which is also what makes the aisles work: the aisle is a property of the canonical ingredient, not of whatever wording happened to appear in a caption.
Doing it by hand
If you are writing lists on paper or in a notes app, you can get most of this benefit with no software at all.
Write your list in seven blocks with the headings above, rather than recipe-by-recipe. Add each ingredient into the right block as you read through your recipes, and combine as you go — when you are about to write "garlic" and it is already there, add to it instead.
It takes about two minutes longer to write and saves considerably more than that in the shop. It also makes the duplicates obvious, which is the part software is genuinely better at.
The reason to want an app is not that the sorting is hard. It is that doing it by hand every week is exactly the sort of small recurring chore that gets abandoned in about a fortnight.
What we're building
FasterChef builds the list from your meal plan automatically, merges on the ingredient rather than the wording, converts units within their own dimension, sorts by aisle, and remembers it when you move something. Change a meal on Tuesday and the list updates — with everything you already ticked still ticked.
The plan it builds from is generated from the recipes you saved yourself, which is the other half of what makes the list short.
It is coming to iPhone. The waitlist is below.