How AI can help with your grocery list

There are tons of ways AI can help you in day-to-day life. AI can help you generate emails, get advice about work or other aspects of life, and so on. But it can also help with smaller tasks that you might not even think of using it for — like, for example, your grocery shopping. 

Curious about how you can use AI to make a better grocery list? Here are some ideas:

Use photos to add items to your list

Remember: AI models are multimodal, meaning photos in your prompt can become text. That can come in handy when making your shopping list.

Plenty of people still prefer to write their shopping lists using a good ol’ paper and pen — and it makes sense. After all, when you share a list with multiple people, sometimes it just makes sense to keep a list on the fridge or somewhere else in the kitchen rather than try and move to digital. At the end of the week, when you’re about to go buy what’s on your shopping list, you can use an AI app to digitize your list so you can easily access it and tick things off on your phone.

AI object and text recognition has gotten very good over the years, and many AI services, like ChatGPT, can read even scratchy handwriting. That can let you take a photo of your physical list, and have it make a digital list for you, which you can then copy into another app, like Reminders, if you so choose.

Let AI break add recipe ingredients to your list

Even cooler than simply taking a photo of your list is having AI automatically create a list with all the ingredients you need. Because of the fact that AI can read many web pages, all you need to do is send the link to an AI chatbot like ChatGPT, and have it create a list for you. You could even have it change the amounts you need based on how many people you’re cooking for or how many servings you want — eliminating the need to do all that math manually. 

Use AI to create entire meal plans and shopping guide

Zoom out one step further — what if you don’t want to meal plan in the first place? AI services can help you there too — and they do so very easily. Simply ask a service like ChatGPT to help you meal plan. Give it any dietary restrictions, the number of meals you want planned, and how long you want to spend cooking those meals. You could even give it ingredients you already have. It’ll plan out those meals, and you can then have it tweak the list based on your input.

When you’re happy with the meal selection, tell it to make a full list (including amounts) of all the ingredients you need to make the meals, and you’re good to go. Of course, you’ll want to double-check the ingredients to make sure you don’t buy stuff you already have.

Use AI to streamline your shop

What if you already have a list, but you simply want it organized by section to ensure that you’re as efficient as possible? That’s easy. Copy and paste your shopping list straight into an AI service — ChatGPT perhaps — and ask it to organize the list based on which section of the supermarket each item is in. It may not have an internal map of your local grocery story, but it will at least lump everything into broad categories.

Could it get easier than that?