Our Groceries Shopping List

Review by eFreeware

Someone remembers the milk at the wrong moment, and by the time anyone reaches the store the note is still stuck to the refrigerator door. Household shopping breaks down less often because people forget what to buy than because the list lives in one place and one head. Our Groceries, from OurGroceries, Inc., is built around the idea that the list should travel with everyone who contributes to it.

It costs nothing to use, with ads, and a cheap upgrade removes them for the whole family. It has been installed more than a million times and holds a 4.7 average across 55,986 ratings, which suggests a lot of households have made it part of their routine. What interests me is the scope: this is not only a grocery list, but a shared household checklist that can hold recipes, pantry staples and errands in the same place.

One live list instead of four versions of it

The core promise is simple. Add milk to the list and everyone in the household sees it within seconds, whether they are at home, at work, or already walking the aisles. That immediacy is the part that matters most, because it turns the list into something you can trust rather than something you have to reconcile later. If two people shop on the same day, they are working from the same set of items.

Checking things off is visible to everyone too, so you can watch items disappear as your partner shops. That sounds like a small detail, but it is the difference between a list that updates and a list that merely exists. The developer frames the app as a household tool rather than a personal one, and the design follows that: one shared list, many contributors.

The recent addition of a List Sharing screen extends this beyond the household. A single list can now be shared with someone outside your home through a link, which is useful for a potluck, a shared vacation rental or a group gift. It is a narrower kind of sharing than the household list, and for many people that is exactly the right scope.

Recipes, photos and the details that prevent wrong purchases

Beyond the shared list, the app collects the material that usually lives in your head. You can catalog recipes and add every ingredient for a meal to the list in one tap, which makes planning a week of dinners a matter of minutes rather than a separate exercise. A pantry staples list keeps the things you restock regularly in one place, so a quick check of the cupboard turns into a few taps.

Photos do double duty here. You can add an item by taking a picture, and the app uses image recognition to turn that photo into a list entry, with the developer noting that auto-categorization for camera-added items has improved. You can also attach a photo or a note to any item, which is how you make sure the right brand or size comes home regardless of who is shopping. That is the feature I would expect to matter most in households where more than one person buys the same products.

Organization is handled in two ways. You can sort the list by category or aisle so a trip follows a sensible path through the store, and the app offers built-in category suggestions, including region-specific ones for Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere. Barcode scanning adds another route for getting an item onto the list, and the whole thing works for non-grocery lists as well: errands, packing checklists, reminders, movies, gifts.

The devices it meets you on

A shared list only works if everyone can reach it, and this is where the app casts a wide net. The app works on phones and tablets from both major platforms, plus any laptop. Voice assistants are supported as well, so Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant can add items, and Apple Watch or Wear OS watches are supported for hands-free shopping. If one person in the household prefers a phone and another prefers a computer, the list does not care.

The app also keeps your material backed up automatically. Items, lists and recipes are stored by OurGroceries, so upgrading, replacing or restoring a phone does not mean rebuilding everything from scratch. You can keep one list or set up several, since the app places no limit on how many you make.

What it asks of you, and what it costs

The app is free to download and every feature is available in the ad-supported version, according to the developer. A single low-cost upgrade removes ads for the whole family rather than for one person, which is a sensible shape for a household tool. I would treat the ads as the price of the free tier, and the upgrade as the way to remove them if the app becomes a daily habit.

The requirements are mostly practical rather than technical. Everybody who needs the list has to be using the app, so the household has to agree on it. The same goes for the extras: voice commands need a supported assistant, watch support needs a compatible watch, and camera-based item adding needs a camera. None of that is unusual, but it does mean the app works best when the whole household opts in together.

There is also a small amount of setup implied by the way the app is organized. Recipes have to be cataloged before they can be added in one tap, and pantry staples have to be listed before they can be restocked quickly. That is front-loaded effort, not ongoing effort, and it is the kind of thing that pays off after a few weeks of shopping.

Getting the most out of a shared list

If I were setting this up for a household, I would start with the list itself and leave the rest for later. Get everyone adding items for a couple of weeks, including the person who does not normally shop, and see whether the shared list actually replaces the texts and the paper notes. If it does, the app has already earned its place, and the recipes and pantry features become additions rather than obligations.

The second step I would take is attaching photos and notes to the items that are easy to get wrong. Brand, size and variety are the details that produce a wasted trip, and a photo attached to the item removes the ambiguity without a phone call from the store. This is the sort of preparation that takes a few minutes once and then quietly prevents the same mistake every week.

After that, the categorization is worth a look. Sorting by aisle or category changes the shape of a shopping trip, and the region-specific suggestions mean the categories should match the way stores are laid out where you live. For households that plan meals, cataloging a handful of regular recipes and adding their ingredients in one tap is the step that turns the app from a list into a planning tool.

Finally, I would use the separate lists rather than fighting one long one. Errands, packing and gifts can each have their own list, and the app supports as many as you want. Keeping groceries apart from everything else is what stops the shopping list from becoming a junk drawer.

A shared list that earns its keep in busy households

Our Groceries is at its best in a household where more than one person buys groceries and the list is currently held together by memory and messaging. The live sync, the photo and note attachments, the recipe-to-list shortcut and the pantry list all point at the same problem: making sure the right items come home without a round of phone calls. The free, ad-supported version puts every feature within reach, and the one-time upgrade removes ads for the family if the app sticks.

It is also a reasonable fit for anyone who wants a single app for groceries, errands and checklists rather than three. The breadth of device support means the list is reachable from a phone, a tablet, a laptop or a watch, and the voice assistants cover the moments when your hands are full. What it is not is a specialty tool for couponing or price tracking; it is a list app, and it does that job thoroughly.

For a household that shops together in the loosest sense, this is a straightforward install. The 4.7 average from a large body of ratings suggests the approach holds up for a lot of people, and the feature set covers the parts of shopping that usually go wrong. If your list currently lives in one person's head, this is the kind of app that fixes the problem rather than documenting it.

What's new

• New “List Sharing” screen that lets you share a single list with someone outside your household by using a link. • Better auto-categorization of items added with your camera.