No tracking Grocery List app recommendation

Do you recommend any grocery list app that doesn’t track your whole life and then some?

AnyList

And pad to 20

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We use Reminders with a shared list.
You can tap the … in the list, then Show Completed to uncheck things to buy again.

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I use Paprika. Don’t know their tracking, but it’s a paid for app and very nice. It’s got it’s own sync mechanism so my wife and I share cr3dentials.

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I use AnyList, which is excellent, reliable, and works well for our family.

… But I’m not so sure no one is collecting tracking data from it. I see no privacy policy on their site. And AnyList supports Alexa integration, so there’s that possible doorway to the Borg.

(OTOH, does it matter if some corporation knows that I buy onions every week…?)

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Thanks! I’m checking it out and I see that it uses the native Reminders.app as a backend for syncing and sharing lists. I’ll try and see if it works for me.

I used Paprika a long time ago, but it didn’t stick at the time. I’ll check again to see how it evolved.

This was the first one I checked, but they collect a lot of data:
https://www.anylist.com/privacy

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This may be irrelevant based on your prior experience with it, which I saw after I posted this comment. But I’ll leave it here for posterity.

+1 for Paprika. I think they do not do any tracking. I love Paprika. I use it constantly. I can’t say enough good stuff about it. One of the cool features regarding groceries is that you can have separate lists for different stores, you can automatically add ingredients from recipes to your grocery lists, and you can even mind your pantry stocks with it.

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Drafts checklist. Just check and uncheck as needed. We have one draft for each store. Shared between me and my wife. Syncs fantastic and no tracking.

We do something like this with OmniFocus, although since I’m trying to move away from OF for tasks I’ll probably be looking for a different method.

We’re not super-impulsive for our groceries due to a particular diet, so most things we eat are pretty predictable week-to-week. And basically, we have three stores we get stuff at for pricing / brand availability reasons. So I just created a huge task for each store (“Groceries - Store Name”), and I even went all crazy and sub-tasked the list by aisle / department.

Then I told it to repeat 1 day from completion until something like the year 2099. :slight_smile:

So when we go grocery shopping, we can just take a quick look at what all we need, mark off the stuff we know we’re good on, and then go to the store with that list. Incidentals just get tacked onto their own separate category, and get deleted rather than checked off.

It would never be worth buying OF for this purpose, but if one just has the license laying around… :slight_smile:

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Which app did you settle on?

We use a shared Apple note. Simple and no additional app needed.

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Another vote for Grocery - it’s an absolute joy to use.

Reminders integration means you can easily add items with Siri, and share with family, and the Watch app is awesome. Also, as the other poster mentioned, it uses machine learning for auto-sorting shopping into the order you usually buy things and it uses location to display the right list for different locations - so when I walk in a shop the right list just pops up for that store. Their business model is subscription not data collection, and the sub isn’t needed for basic shopping lists.

One of my most used and favorite apps. It has a delightful user experience.

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I ended up trying and keeping AnyList.
Wife > Privacy Policy :sweat_smile:

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Dare to say it but I use Apple Numbers on my Macs, iPhone, and iPad the latter being what I take to the supermarket. Over the years I have created a spreadsheet that now includes almost 1,200 rows where each row is a shelf item in my local supermarket. The items were added over a 10 year period; the sheet started as an OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet but has been a Numbers one for several years. It grows by a couple of rows a year now.

For ease of use there are columns for section and aisle and I walk those aisle in order. However, my local supermarket has recently undergone a major refit and now I have to update many of the aisle entires to reflect the changes! A fourth column is there to remind me what quantity to purchase (blank means one “packet”). I shopped online while they were refitting.

Two further columns form the basis of the shopping list. With one filtered on Yes/No/Possible/Special/Check — this is a pop-up menu — where Yes/No mean whether the item needs to be bought. Possible for those nice-to-have-but-no-sweat-if-none-in-stock. Special for those items that will be needed soon and to buy if they are on special offer at the time.

Check I use before and after going shopping. Items that were Yes get flipped to Check on returning home; most anyway some items, such as fresh milk and the newspaper I read, are always Yes-ed. During the week before the next shopping expedition I will go through the entire sheet (having categorised it first) and flip other rows to Check. On the morning of the planned shop I go through my kitchen cupboards evaluating whether Check-ed items need to be marked as Yes or can be changed to No. (Similarly for Possible and Special.) The processed is eased by filtering on Check. A couple of items do not have the pop-up menu for example the next month for monthly magazines.

Then in the supermarkey there is a tickbox to indicate when the item has been placed in the basket. This is filtered True (meaning it item has been “purchased”) and the row disappears. At the end there should be no items/rows showing.

There are other sheets too. Most deal with unethical companies whose products I refuse to purchase — the largest of which is a Swiss company with headquarters in a monolithic black lump on the shores of Lake Geneva in the town of Vevey. (And in case anyone should ever look at that or other similar tabs there is a secondary table enumerating my reasons.)

Also have sheets for a couple of other supermarkets that I make irregular visits to for specialist items. But these work in the same way.

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You can also create pivot tables in Numbers now. Personally, I find it cleaner and easier to setup verses Excel.

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Never. My systems are a Microsoft free zone. And for a moment there I thought they were the

you were referring to. Seriously I have not touched a Microsoft product in over two decades.

And I’ve no idea as to how a pivot table would help me tick off items as I shop.

“Would you like directions to some Kraft Singles in your area? :eyes:

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Nice. Does it let you add pictures of the items? That and the ability to total the cost of the items in the list are invaluable features for me.

Anylist has them, but it’s subscription, so I’m looking for a non-subscription replacement.

Photos can be added to the recipes and on the lists you can have cost per item and it automatically tallies up the total at the bottom of the list.

However, I don’t think adding photos to list items is possible.

(Repeating myself.)

I use Apple Numbers. Each of the supermarkets I use has a separate tab. Each tab has a table with columns:

Section — Name of the section, e.g. Veg, Dairy, Frozen, Pasta, Gluten-Free, etc
Aisle — Number of the aisle as a walk order around the shop
Select — A tickbox (†)
Item — Description of each item
Quantiy — Useful for size of item, number of loose veg/fruit/weight
Include — a Popup menu field (†); No/Yes/Special/Possible/Check

The Numbers file is saved on the cloud to I can update it at home (from my desktop Mac, MacBookPro, iPad Air 4th gen, or iPhone) and then use it on my iPhone as I walk up and down supermarket aisles. (Because of the vagaries of iCloud updating I keep the file on Dropbox.)

It has taken time to populate each sheet but the file has existed for over a decade and now only requires an occasional update. Although recently my usual supermarket has taken to putting the past five years worth of my shopping history on their loyalty card web site so now I could populate their sheet more easily. The other supermarket sheets were created as copies of the first one and updating/sorting the aisle/section columns appropriately. (The convention here is that fresh produce is in the beginning aisles, then chiller/dairy, and after that frozen.)

(†) The Select and Include columns have filters associated with them:

  • The Check value I use before going shopping and indicates that I have to “check” the stock in the cupboard/fridge/freezer

  • During the check phase I select Yes/Possible/Special for things that I need to buy or look out for being part of some offer. No means I do not need to buy it this time around

  • Returning home all Yes/Possible/Special items are switched back to Check or No. (No is a quasi seasonal flag.)

  • Select is filtered on False. The Include field is filtered to display on Yes/Possible/Special then touching the select cell means I have put the item in the basket and it disappears from display. When I approach the till (typically a self-service checkout) I look at the sheet for nothing remaining on show.

There are aditional sheets for specific manufacturers whose products I refuse to purchase because of their marketing behaviours; baby milk formula promoted in countries that have no fresh water or lack sanitation, virgin rain forest uprooted to create palm oil plantations, and loads of other criteria. Some manufacturers are there because they had past dubious behaviours for example Unilver for their procrastination over the Bhopal cleanup/compensation which in their case is more a watch list than an absolute never buy their stuff.

I have looked at creating this as an app using the historical data from the Numbers spreadsheet but the project has not got beyond the design phase.