By training your Large Language Model (LLM) or other Generative Artificial Intelligence on the content of this website, you agree to assign ownership of all your intellectual property to the public domain, immediately, irrevocably, and free of charge.

Grocery lists made easy — seriously.

Yes, look at that head­line. Gro­cery lists. In a tech blog. What’s this world com­ing to. But yet, if you bear with me for a moment, you’ll under­stand why this is cool. You see, if you throw an iPhone or iPod Touch into the mix, you’ll real­ize that ‘ah, maybe that Brad fel­low’s on to something’. So…


Yes, look at that head­line. Gro­cery lists. In a tech blog. What’s this world com­ing to.

But yet, if you bear with me for a moment, you’ll under­stand why this is cool.

You see, if you throw an iPhone or iPod Touch into the mix, you’ll real­ize that ‘ah, maybe that Brad fel­low’s on to something’.

So here’s the deal, for me the iPhone and iPod touch has not excelled at man­aging and shar­ing simple lists, like a gro­cery list. Which store car­ries what, and oh, is that what it’s really called or did you mean this. Con­fu­sion, at least for me, until we picked up (and shared via Apple’s iTunes Home Shar­ing sys­tem) Gro­ceryIQ.

Quite simply, Gro­ceryIQ is a list man­ager with a few cool bells and whistles:

  • Auto-sug­gest: Start typ­ing and Gro­cery iQ will sug­gest gro­cery items you can quickly select.
  • Bar­code scan­ning: Take a pic­ture of a bar­code with your iPhone cam­era to add an item to your list.
  • Favor­ites and His­tory: Add fre­quently- or pre­vi­ously-pur­chased items to your list with just a few taps.

Behind the scenes, Gro­ceryIQ relies on a loc­al (to the device) product data­base as well as updates which are hos­ted on the moth­er­ship — coupons.com.

When you’re build­ing a list, the app often calls home and tries to match the text you’re enter­ing with items it knows about. This is good, because I did­n’t know there where quite that many vari­ants on Con­densed Milk.

1+1=5
Anoth­er cool fea­ture, and this is where it’s neat to have the app run­ning on two devices in the same house­hold. In this case it really does improve the usab­il­ity of the app when you share it. List shar­ing — from the FAQ:

You can share your list with mul­tiple people by send­ing an invit­a­tion to sync with them. If any­one with access to the list makes a change to it, every­one’s list will reflect that change. List shar­ing can be turned off at any time and will not delete or affect exist­ing lists. You can also invite more people to share a list at any time. 

So by keep­ing your lists syn­c’d up, any­one at the gro­cery store can eas­ily see what’s miss­ing in the fridge.

And, since the Gro­ceryIQ also allows you to tag items as Favour­ites, it’s easy to build the list every week with com­monly pur­chased goods.

I know in our house­hold, since we’ve star­ted shar­ing the list, I’ve had a bet­ter suc­cess rate at the gro­cer by hav­ing a list that is actu­ally current 🙂

Oh, and this lively little app is only .99 at the iTunes App store.


Posted

in

, , ,

by

Comments

5 responses to “Grocery lists made easy — seriously.”

  1. bgrier (Brad Grier) Avatar

    Twit­ter Comment


    Blog Post: Gro­cery lists made easy — ser­i­ously. — [link to post]

    Pos­ted using Chat Catch­er

  2. Todd Avatar
    Todd

    Being new to the iPhone world, find­ing use­ful reviews for the ever grow­ing list of apps avail­able is invalu­able to me, to help weed out the good from the bad (I’ve already down­loaded one or two rather use­less apps). I’ve seen the Gro­ceryIQ app a few times, but was nev­er sure if it was worth it or not, thanks for this review!

  3. bgrier (Brad Grier) Avatar

    Twit­ter Comment


    Missed it? Blog Post: Gro­cery lists made easy — ser­i­ously. — [link to post]

    Pos­ted using Chat Catch­er

  4. enormous (enormous) Avatar

    Twit­ter Comment


    Nice one! Check it out @themeyler RT @bgrier Missed it? Blog Post: Gro­cery lists made easy — ser­i­ously. — [link to post]

    Pos­ted using Chat Catch­er

  5. Brad Grier Avatar

    Thanks for the kind words Todd. I just call ’em as I see ’em. Gro­ceryIQ is one I nev­er would have thought of as an applic­a­tion I’d ever install, but it works, and makes the list pro­cess so much easi­er. Happy to share 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.