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Shopping list

The Shopping page (/shopping) is a quick-add list with per-user grouping, aisle awareness, drag-to-reorder, and one-tap bulk clear. Rows can be typed in by hand, pushed from a single recipe, or fanned out from a whole week of planned cooks.

Grouping

Under Settings > Cooking > Shopping List > Default Grouping, pick one of:

  • By Aisle (default): every row groups under its aisle heading (Produce, Dairy, Bakery, and so on). Aisle comes from the row's linked pantry item via its category's default_aisle. Untagged rows fall under a trailing "Other" group.
  • By Recipe: rows group under whichever recipe pushed them. Manual rows (no recipe_id) sit in an "Other" section at the end.
  • Flat: no groups. A single sorted list.

Drag any row inside its group to reorder. Cross-group drag (drop a row into a different aisle) works too. The order persists via POST /api/shopping/reorder, so a hand-arranged aisle stays put across page loads.

Combined items

In By Aisle and Flat, rows with the same name and unit show as a single row. Add Pancakes and Bread and you get one "Flour 3 cup" row with a pill for each recipe, instead of two Flour rows. The amounts are added up; if any of them has no amount, the combined row shows none rather than a wrong total. Different units stay separate, so "2 cup flour" and "200 g flour" are two rows.

Checking, removing, dragging, or changing the aisle of a combined row applies to every row behind it. In Edit, changing only the name or unit updates them all and keeps each recipe's own amount; changing the amount folds them into one row with the new amount.

By Recipe doesn't combine anything, so each recipe still shows its own rows, and the recipe block's trash icon removes only that recipe's share. The list is stored one row per recipe either way; combining only changes how it's shown.

Checked-item behaviour

Tap the checkbox and the row strikes through and drops to the bottom of the list; the DB flips checked = 1 and the sort clause slots checked rows last. Under Settings > Cooking > Shopping List > Checked Items you can switch this to Hide if you'd rather not see checked rows at all.

Neither mode deletes anything. Rows stay put until you hit Clear Checked on the toolbar, which soft-deletes every checked row in one call (DELETE /api/shopping/checked). That's the "wipe the trolley" moment when you're home.

Restock the pantry

Clear Checked asks before clearing, and lists the pantry items you've just bought that are still marked out of stock, all ticked. Untick anything you didn't actually get, then Clear: the list is cleared and the ticked items go back in stock, so there's no second trip through the Pantry tab. The toast that follows has an Undo that puts those pantry items back out of stock.

An item is only offered when it's clearly the same thing: the shopping row is linked to a pantry item, or its name matches exactly one pantry item (ignoring case). If there's no match, or more than one, it isn't listed and nothing in the pantry changes. A generic parent such as Milk has no stock of its own, so it shows a dropdown for which variant you bought, starting on its designated variant if one is set. A generic already covered by an in-stock variant, like any item already in stock, isn't listed.

Restocking marks the item in stock and clears a quantity of 0. Expiry dates and other quantities are left as they are.

Add from a recipe

Open any recipe and tap Add to Shopping. Every ingredient lands on your list, stamped with recipe_id so the By-Recipe view can badge the block and so the small trash icon on that block can wipe all of that recipe's rows in one shot (DELETE /api/shopping/by-recipe/:id).

The picker's Only add items I don't have in pantry toggle (on by default) uses each ingredient's pantry link plus the item's in_stock value to skip anything you already have. Turn it off to force the full ingredient list onto the shopping list regardless of stock. See Pantry for how stock tracking works.

Shop This Plan

Open the Diary page, hit Shop This Plan, pick a date range (defaults to today plus 7 days), and POST /api/shopping/from-plan walks every planned cook in that window and merges their ingredients before writing:

  • Same name plus same unit collapses into a single row.
  • Numeric quantities sum when every contributor has one. If any contributor is qty-less ("flour", no number), the merged row goes qty-less rather than lie about totals.
  • The pantry-stocked skip applies the same way, controlled by the same "Only add items I don't have in pantry" toggle.

See Cook Diary and Meal Planner for how planned cooks land in the calendar.

Manual rows

The quick-add row at the top of the page takes a name, optional quantity, optional unit, and optional aisle. Names get title-cased on save so the list reads consistently regardless of source (Mealie's canonical "fresh lemon juice" becomes Fresh Lemon Juice; small connective words like "and" or "of" stay lowercase per Chicago rules).

Shared list?

The list is per-user. There's no built-in "share the shopping list with my flatmate" flow in v1.0. If both users are in a Kitchen, the practical pattern is: one person runs Shop This Plan on the shared plan, everyone else shops from their own screen, and only the person who checked something has that row checked.

From NoteTrace

If you keep lists in NoteTrace, a checklist there can send its open items straight to this shopping list, and NoteTrace can show this list, grouped by aisle, and check items off. Items it sends are title-cased, take the aisle of a pantry item with the same name, and aren't added twice when they're already on the list.

It needs no server setting here. In CookTrace Settings, API Tokens, create a token with just the shopping scope (it reaches nothing but your shopping list) and paste it into NoteTrace. See Send to CookTrace.