How I stopped rebuilding my grocery list every week
How to automate your kitchen inventory, buy back your time & never write a grocery list from scratch again.
🎧 Prefer to listen while you drive or fold laundry? Paid subscribers can click the play button at the top of this post.
If you’ve ever stared into an open fridge at 4:00 PM and felt a wave of absolute dread, you know that the hardest part of grocery shopping isn’t the driving or the paying.
It’s the thinking.
It’s the mental gymnastics. Did I use the last of the cumin? Did the kids actually eat the yogurt I bought last week? It’s the act of inventing the wheel, from scratch, every single week.
The average trip to the grocery store takes 46 minutes. And honestly? I’d argue that’s being conservative. I know for me, it’s 30 minutes just to get to and from my store. Do that twice a week & we’re talking at least 2 hours spent just buying food.
That doesn’t even account for the invisible labor: the list-making, the inventory checking, & the constant mental tab of “what are we out of?”
We have to stop treating our kitchens like art studios where we create something new every week, and start treating them like a wardrobe.
The goal isn’t to go into our kitchens hoping for inspiration. The goal is having a reliable uniform. The goal is to focus on inventory management so that we don’t have to wait for inspiration to strike in order to get our families fed. And I’m breaking down exactly how I automated the process to get my brain back (and save about $3k a year in the process).
Wait, shouldn’t I plan the meals before I shop?
Logically, yes. But we aren’t doing this the “logical” way—we are doing this the sustainable way.
The old way forces you to invent a new meal plan every week that then forces you to generate an entire grocery list from scratch. That is exhausting (not to mention frustrating when you inevitably forget something as obvious as the 2% milk.)
My approach flips the script.
We’re going to start by automating the 80% of items you buy every single week—the milk, the eggs, the school snacks, the coffee. This is your base layer.
Just like you have your favorite jeans and tee that you wear on repeat, your kitchen needs its base layer. When you curate this, your house is always stocked. In a pinch, you can conceivably survive a chaotic week without ordering takeout, even if you never made a meal plan.
In Part II, I’ll share how I stopped rebuilding my dinner plan every week — and what changed when I started working with my real schedule instead of against it.
You can read the intro to this series for free here. Paid subscribers can get my automated grocery system + download the full template right here. 👇
1. The Math (Or: Why I Don’t Feel Guilty About Grocery Services)
