How to Turn Recipes Into One Grocery List

Step 1: Gather the Recipes in One Place

Pick the dinners first. If you have not chosen them yet, our guide to planning a week of meals covers how many to plan and how to choose.

Then put all the recipes where you can see them at once. Open the browser tabs side by side, mark the cookbook pages with a slip of paper, or print the ones you keep losing. You will go through each recipe once, top to bottom, and it helps not to hunt for the next one.

For each recipe, note two numbers at the top: how many servings it makes and how many people will eat it. They are rarely the same.

Step 2: Copy Every Ingredient, Scaled, With Its Dinner

Take a sheet of paper and go through the recipes one at a time. Write down every ingredient as its own line, with the amount, the unit and the form (“chopped”, “canned”, “shredded”). Do not merge anything yet. This is the raw list, and it will look messy.

Scale as you copy. If a curry serves two and four people are eating, double every amount before you write it down. If a chili serves six and you cook for four, multiply by two thirds, or cook all six servings and plan the leftovers as a lunch. Scaling later, after the lines are merged, is where the mistakes creep in, because you can no longer see which part of a line came from which recipe.

Write the dinner next to every line: a day or a short name in the margin. You need it in step 3, and you will want it again on Thursday, when one dinner falls through and you have to know what to leave on the shelf.

Step 3: Merge the Lines That Repeat

Now read down the raw list and find every ingredient that appears more than once. Put them on one line and add the amounts that use the same unit. Amounts in other units wait on that line for step 4.

• Same ingredient, same form: merge. Monday’s onion, Tuesday’s onion and half an onion on Thursday become one line: two and a half onions, tagged with all three dinners.
• Same ingredient, different form: keep apart. Fresh garlic and garlic powder, block cheddar and shredded cheddar, fresh spinach and frozen spinach sit in different parts of the store. Merging them hides a line you still need to buy.
• Similar but not the same: keep apart. Kidney beans and black beans are two lines. So are chicken thighs and chicken breasts.

Keep every dinner tag on the merged line. “Onions, 3 1/2 (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu)” tells you more than “onions, 4”.

Step 4: Convert to One Unit Before You Add

Recipes from different sources measure the same thing in different ways. An American blog asks for a cup of shredded cheddar, a European cookbook for 100 grams, a family card for “a handful”. You cannot add those as written.

• Pick the unit you buy in. Cheese is sold by weight, so convert the cups to grams: a cup of shredded cheddar is about 115 grams. Canned goods are sold by the can, so count cans.
• Convert spoons to spoons. Two tablespoons of chili powder plus one teaspoon is seven teaspoons (a tablespoon is three teaspoons). For spices the total mostly tells you whether the jar in the cupboard is enough.
• Leave the vague ones vague. “A handful of cilantro” and “1/4 cup chopped cilantro” do not add up to a number. Write both on one line and decide when you round: one bunch covers both.
• Count where the store counts. Onions, limes and peppers are sold whole, so add “1/2 onion” to the other onions as half an onion and round in the next step.

For the common conversions, these hold well enough for shopping: 1 cup is about 240 milliliters, 1 pound is about 454 grams, 1 tablespoon is 3 teaspoons.

Step 5: Round Up to What the Store Sells

The merged list now says what the recipes need. The store sells something else: whole onions, whole bunches, cans, packs and tubs. Rewrite each line as what you will actually put in the cart.

• Whole items round up. Three and a half onions is four onions.
• Packs round to the nearest pack. For 700 grams of chicken thighs, take the pack that comes closest above it. Write the amount the recipes need next to it, so you do not grab a family pack by accident.
• Leftover parts get a job or a note. If a recipe needs part of a tub of ricotta, either find a second dinner for the rest or write “freeze the rest” next to the line. Our guide to planning for two has more on pairing dinners that share an ingredient.

Step 6: Sort the List by Aisle

A list in recipe order sends you back and forth across the store. Rewrite the rounded lines in the order you walk: produce first, then the counters, dairy, canned and dry goods, frozen last. Keep the dinner tags.

Our guide to writing a grocery list by aisle gives a default order for most supermarkets, the parts of a store that break it and a template you can draw.

Step 7: Check the Fridge and the Cupboard Last

Now take the sorted list to the kitchen and cross off what you already have. Before the merge, you would have seen “1 onion” three times and thought the one in the basket covered it. Against the total of four, you know to buy three.

Check the staples too: oil, salt, spices, rice, stock. Recipes mention them in passing, and they run out between trips without anyone noticing. Write them on the list even when you think you have them, then cross them off at the cupboard.

A Worked Example: Four Recipes, One List

Here are four dinners for a household of four, taken from four different places.

• Monday: beef chili (an American blog, serves 4). 1 lb ground beef, 1 onion, 3 cloves garlic, 1 can kidney beans, 1 can crushed tomatoes, 2 tbsp chili powder, 1 cup shredded cheddar.
• Tuesday: chicken curry (a cookbook, serves 2, so doubled). 700 g boneless chicken thighs, 1 onion, 4 cloves garlic, 1 can coconut milk, 2 tbsp curry powder, a handful of cilantro, 300 g rice.
• Wednesday: pasta with spinach and ricotta (a printout, serves 4). 500 g pasta, 1 onion, 2 cloves garlic, 1 bag baby spinach, 250 g ricotta, 50 g parmesan.
• Thursday: black bean tacos (a family card, serves 4). 2 cans black beans, 1/2 onion, 1 tsp chili powder, 8 tortillas, 100 g shredded cheddar, 1/4 cup chopped cilantro, 2 limes.

Merged, converted, rounded and sorted, the four recipes become this list:

• Produce. 4 onions (Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu: 3 1/2 needed). 1 head garlic (Mon, Tue, Wed: 9 cloves). 1 bunch cilantro (Tue, Thu). 1 bag baby spinach (Wed). 2 limes (Thu).
• Meat. Ground beef, 1 lb, about 450 g (Mon). 1 pack boneless chicken thighs, at least 700 g (Tue).
• Dairy. Shredded cheddar, at least 215 g (Mon, Thu: 1 cup shredded is about 115 g, plus 100 g). 1 tub ricotta, 250 g (Wed). 1 piece parmesan, at least 50 g (Wed).
• Bakery. 8 tortillas (Thu).
• Canned and dry goods. 1 can kidney beans (Mon). 2 cans black beans (Thu). 1 can crushed tomatoes (Mon). 1 can coconut milk (Tue). 500 g pasta (Wed). 300 g rice (Tue).
• Spices. Chili powder, 2 tbsp plus 1 tsp (Mon, Thu). Curry powder, 2 tbsp (Tue).

Twenty-seven raw lines became nineteen. The onions, the garlic, the cheddar, the cilantro and the chili powder each appear once, the kidney beans and black beans stay apart, and every line still says which dinner needs it. The last two blocks are where the cupboard check usually crosses off the most.

Where an App Helps

Steps 2 to 6 are arithmetic and sorting, and that is the part software does well. Most apps that turn recipes into a list fall into a few shapes.

• Apps that keep your recipe collection. Plan to Eat builds the list by aisle from recipes you saved and put on its calendar. Paprika adds up the ingredients of the recipes you pick and keeps your data on the device, so it works without a signal.
• Apps that capture recipes from social posts. ReciMe pulls recipes from Instagram, TikTok and screenshots and sorts the list by aisle or by recipe.
• List apps with a recipe import. AnyList’s free plan shares lists and imports five recipes from websites; meal planning on a calendar comes with the paid Complete plan.

Before you choose one, test it on a week you already wrote by hand:

• Does it merge across recipes? Two recipes with an onion each should give you one line with two onions, not two lines.
• Does it convert units or just stack them? “1 cup shredded cheddar” and “100 g shredded cheddar” on separate lines means you still do step 4 yourself.
• Does it keep the recipe on each line? Without it, dropping a dinner means rereading every recipe.
• Does it take your own recipes? The ones from the cookbook and the family cards are usually the ones you cook most.

Unless an app tracks your pantry, step 7 stays with you. Our comparison of meal planning apps that write the grocery list and our comparison of grocery list apps look at the apps in more detail.

Where Simmerset Fits

Simmerset starts from the week of dinners. It proposes dinners from its catalog, and you can put your own recipes on any day: import one from a link, five a week on Free and thirty on Plus, or type it in by hand. An imported recipe waits until you have checked it once, and the planner never adds your own recipes by itself.

From the dinners on the week, it writes one grocery list:

• Merged where the units allow. Quantities that repeat across dinners are added up into one line.
• Grouped by aisle. Every line sits under an aisle. The aisles are broad categories, so you may still move a line or two to match your store.
• Tagged with its dinner. Every line says which dinner needs it, so dropping Thursday shows what to leave on the shelf.
• Scaled to the servings. Change one dinner’s servings and the list follows.

There is no pantry, so the cupboard check in step 7 is still yours. There is no retailer account or store to pick, so you shop the list wherever you like. Simmerset runs in the browser, and there is an iPhone app in the App Store and an Android app on Google Play.