The perfect grocery list-making app doesn’t exist

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.

The paper planner segment got tested too, with Papier's meal planning notebook entering the mix. While beautiful, the structured format proved impractical for real-world use. "I ran out of space about halfway through my grocery list, meanwhile leaving a lot of blank space on the other side because I don't need to plan out and write down seven individual breakfasts every single week," Johnson writes.

The breakthrough came when Johnson realized her "struggle - making the grocery list - was actually a bunch of little related struggles all bundled up together." Recipe collection, meal planning, remembering household preferences, list generation, and in-store reference each demanded different solutions.

Her final system combines multiple tools strategically. The fancy Papier planner handles weekly meal planning, where extra space gets used for noting family activities. Paprika manages recipe storage and generates shopping lists. But the game-changer? A smartwatch for in-store list checking.

"Taking my phone out at the store over and over to check things off my list feels like too much friction," Johnson discovered. "But checking my list on a smartwatch and tapping away the things I've already picked up? So much easier." During her weekend test run, she reports flying through the store with "unprecedented speed" while actually getting everything on her list.

The smartwatch solution does hit platform limitations. Paprika lacks Wear OS support, forcing Johnson to copy lists into Google Keep when using Android devices. "I guess that'll make me the third person using Google Keep voluntarily," she jokes.

Johnson's experience reflects broader challenges in the productivity app market. Developers often try to solve every aspect of a complex workflow in a single app, missing the nuanced ways people actually work. Meanwhile, users get frustrated when no single solution handles their complete needs.

The grocery planning space specifically suffers from this all-in-one trap. Apps focus on recipe discovery, meal planning, or list management, but rarely excel at connecting these functions seamlessly. Subscription models add another barrier, especially for basic productivity tasks people feel should be simple.

Industry data suggests Johnson isn't alone in her frustrations. App store reviews for grocery planning apps frequently mention missing features, platform limitations, and subscription fatigue. The market appears ripe for disruption, but the solution might not be another all-in-one app.

Instead, Johnson's multi-tool approach might represent the future of productivity workflows. Rather than forcing everything into one app, users could benefit from specialized tools that integrate smoothly. Paper planners for big-picture thinking, focused apps for specific tasks, and wearables for contextual access create a more flexible system than any single solution.

Johnson's grocery list odyssey reveals a larger truth about productivity software: sometimes the best solution isn't the most elegant one. Her hybrid approach of paper planning, specialized apps, and wearable integration delivers better results than any single "perfect" app could. For developers, there's a lesson here about building focused tools that play well with others rather than trying to own the entire workflow. As for the rest of us still wandering grocery aisles with illegible lists? Maybe it's time to embrace the multi-tool approach and stop searching for that mythical perfect app.