After years of forgetting crucial items and turning grocery lists into illegible messes, one tech writer embarked on a quest to find the ultimate meal planning and grocery list solution. The verdict? No single app can solve the complex puzzle of modern grocery shopping, but combining multiple tools might finally crack the code.
The grocery store battlefield claims another victim every week - shoppers wandering aisles with crumpled paper lists, frantically trying to remember if they need one or two pounds of ground beef. The Verge's Allison Johnson just spent months testing every grocery list app she could find, and her conclusion might surprise productivity app developers everywhere: the perfect solution still doesn't exist.
Johnson's journey started with a familiar frustration. "Every week I write out a list by hand, and every week I forget something crucial," she writes in her comprehensive review published today. Her quest led her through a maze of apps, paper planners, and hybrid solutions that revealed just how complex the seemingly simple task of grocery shopping has become.
The testing began with A Better Meal, which promises to solve the entire meal planning workflow. The app can photograph recipes from cookbooks, import them from websites, and automatically generate shopping lists. Its cook-along mode displays each recipe step in large type with relevant ingredients listed alongside - a feature Johnson praised after learning the hard way that mixing up tablespoons and teaspoons of cayenne has consequences.
But A Better Meal's subscription model proved to be a deal-breaker. "I was impressed with the app's recipe intake tools," Johnson notes, "but I ruled it out on account of me being too cheap for another subscription." The app represents a broader trend in the productivity space where useful features get locked behind monthly fees that many users simply won't pay.
Next up was Paprika, the no-frills recipe manager that The Verge's senior policy editor Adi Robertson has championed for years. The app costs just $4.99 on iOS (free up to 50 recipes on Android) and offers something crucial that fancier apps miss: flexibility. Johnson discovered she could create a "recipe" called "The Regulars" containing items like milk and bread, then add them to her shopping list with a couple of taps.
"When I realized I could add all of our usual weekly grocery items as ingredients to a 'recipe' and add them to the list with a couple of taps? That's when it started clicking for me," she explains. Paprika's cross-platform availability proved essential for households switching between iOS and Android devices.
