How to organise a shopping list by aisle (and shop twice as fast)

For a couple of years I'd start every shop in the bread aisle, grab a loaf, then end up back there ten minutes later because somewhere further down my list, wedged under "eggs" for no good reason, I'd written "pitta". Same corner of the shop, twice, every week.

The slow part of a shop was never deciding what to buy. It was the walking. And the reason I was walking so much came down to the order I'd written the list in.

A normal list comes out in the order things land in your head. You notice the milk's low, you remember the bin bags, someone texts you "we need coriander". None of that has anything to do with where those things actually sit in the shop. So you criss-cross the floor, double back, and do the same aisle more than once without realising.

Why sorting by aisle actually saves time

Group the list by section instead and the walking sorts itself out. Everything from one part of the store sits together, the sections line up in the order you'll reach them, and you do one lap front to back. It sounds obvious written down. It took me an embarrassingly long time to actually do it. A few things change at once:

• You walk less. One pass through the store instead of three laps and a panicked return to the dairy fridge.
• You forget less, because everything from one aisle is sitting together on the list rather than scattered down it.
• You read the list faster. Sounds minor. It isn't, when you're doing it forty-odd times a year.

Doing it by hand

You don't need an app for this. The manual version is simple enough:

1. Write down everything, however it comes to you.
2. Group it into rough sections: fruit and veg, meat and fish, dairy, bakery, the long-life cupboard stuff, frozen, household.
3. Put those sections in the order you walk your usual shop. For most places that's fresh produce first, freezers and cleaning bits last.
4. Rewrite the list in that order.

It works fine. The catch is you're doing it from scratch every week, holding your store's running order in your head, and re-jigging the lot every time someone adds kitchen roll after you've already sorted it. I lasted about three weeks before I gave up. Most people I've spoken to lasted about the same.

The version without the Sunday-night admin

This is genuinely why I built Ticklyst. You type an item the way you'd actually say it, "milk", "hobnobs", "chicken thighs", and it files itself into the right aisle. No picking a category from a dropdown after every entry. There's a dictionary of around 1,300 UK groceries doing the sorting in the background, and it knows brand names too, so Lurpak lands in dairy and Twix lands with the snacks.

Then you tell it which supermarket you're going to, and the list rearranges to match that shop. That part mattered more than I expected when I started building it, because a Tesco and a Lidl genuinely don't put things in the same order.

Two shops, two completely different routes

I assumed aisle layouts were broadly the same everywhere until I sat down and mapped them. The edges of the store are roughly consistent, produce by the door and chilled along the back wall, but the running order through the middle varies a lot, and the middle is where most of the backtracking happens. A few that caught me out:

• Lidl hits you with the bakery the second you walk in. That's on purpose.
• Iceland leads with frozen, which makes sense the moment you remember why people go to Iceland.
• M&S Food keeps the nice biscuits and the Percy Pigs up by the tills, where they do the most damage.
• Costco isn't really aisles at all. It's pallets, with the non-food in the middle and a walk-in freezer at the back.

I mapped the running order for 14 UK and Irish supermarkets, each one based on how that chain usually lays a store out. Line your list up with the shop you're actually standing in and the route stops fighting you. You stop thinking about where to go next, which was always the bit that slowed me down.